Any system that gives soldiers bonuses for shooting people is likely
result in such murders. Once they think of certain people as trash, they will
proceed to think that it's good to kill any or all of them, and that's how
they can reconcile the murder and the lies with their consciences.

Police in Toronto
bottled up a group
of protestors, plus lots of passersby and people trying to go home from
work, attacked them, and squeezed them into a small area for 4 hours as a
storm came down.

It is clear that the goal of this police action was to
attack democracy. The Canadian government, like many others, regards the
people as pawns to be used, and when they don't do as ordered, that is a
nuisance to be put down.

We must never grant legitimacy to the dirty maneuvers that the police
use to sabotage protests. Therefore, when Lisan was told "You should have
left earlier", she should have replied, "Why should I have left at all? I had
a right to be there, and I have a right to protest. Or are you claiming
this is no longer a free country and we no longer have any rights? Are you
being used to destroy our freedom?"

And when she was warned to stay away from protests for 24 hours, on
pain of some unspecified punishment, she should have proposed immediately that
everyone on the bus meet there the next morning. To fail to do so is to
accept, in effect, that the police are entitled to order people arbitrarily
to stay away from protests.

I am told that a different group of protestors managed to burn some
police cars. I find it hard to say that was wrong, but it probably undermined
the effect of the protests. Perhaps they were undercover policemen too.

Israel plans to demolish 22 Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem to make
an archeological park.
Since Israel almost never gives Palestinians permission to build in
Jerusalem, these families will be unable to move even if they get
compensation.

"Settlers" have seized and occupied two houses in the area, and Israeli
troops regularly
attack local residences
to protect the thieves.

Police in
Oklahoma
tazered a bedridden old woman,
after stepping on her oxygen hose to make her pass out. That was after
they had thrown her grandson on the floor and handcuffed him. He had called
911 worried that she wouldn't take her medicine.

I wonder if next the police will charge both of them with crimes.
That's what police usually do after they go on a rampage against someone
innocent.

That this happened to that particular man and his grandmother was
random chance, but the fact that it happened at all was due to the system that
the police follow (including their training).

Here is
what Krugman wrote:
A crucial difference between now and 1932 is that then the Democrats
offered a real alternative, whereas now the Democratic Party is a milder version
of the Republican party.

What this shows is that Iran has no interest in
reaching any agreement in the matter. In other words, the postponed
negotiations will be a waste of time.

The fact that Iran is already enriching uranium beyond what is needed
for nuclear reactors shows that its goal is to make nuclear weapons. It is
probably impossible to prevent Iran from finishing the job.

I expect that Iran will be deterred from its using nuclear weapons by
Israel's nuclear weapons, and that the main effect of Iranian nuclear
weapons will be for propaganda effect, distracting fools in Iran from the tyranny
their government exercises over them.

According to this article, what was done in New York was not simply
giving money to poor people, but rather rewarding those who carried out
certain actions: in this case, making their children go to school. Education is
important, but compulsory schools have serious problems (see Instead of
Education by John Holt). I am not sure how much education a school can provide
to children that don't want to be there, but maybe some of them decided to
study.

Policies like this one, applied to schools that don't act like prisons
but rather tell students to leave if they don't try to study, might result
in a net improvement.

However, what poor countries need most is a lower birth rate. If we can
stabilize the world's population at 8 billion instead of 9 billion, many
species might survive instead of being destroyed, we might have less
ultimate global warming, and poverty will go down. So I suggest combining this
idea with
the one described
a few weeks ago, by giving poor people a certain amount in each year in
which they do not have a child.

In a formal sense, the bill makes progress, since it tightens the
regulations on the banks. But I think the loopholes will enable the
banksters to minimize the effect (bad for them, good for us) of the bill.

However, the US government works actively to protect corporations
from this (as
shown by its actions in regard to Bhopal)
because its first loyalty is to the biggest business. It goes along
with public condemnation in situations like Big Polluter when the
public condemnation is too strong for the government to resist. Then
it goes back to bowing down to business when it thinks the public
isn't looking any more.

Police naturally tend to commit acts of aggression and
lie about them, whenever the political situation supports such activity.
Compare for instance the beating and subsequent prosecution of
Peter Watts
by US border police. The Egyptian emergency law gives police even more
immunity and support, so they can go further.

Peru's right-wing president has
vetoed a law
to give rural people control over mining and oil drilling in their
territories.

Garcia serves the megacorporations through their agent in
Washington. He signed a trade treaty with the US that allows foreign corporations
to mine, destroy and pollute; then he required Obama's permission to make
concessions to avoid civil war. When he says that all Peruvians should have
the same rights, he means the rights to be despoiled all alike.

Maybe Peru's congress should modify the law to apply to urban areas as
well. Why shouldn't city dwellers also have control over extraction in
their localities?

Conservatives warn that
Obama's deadline
for starting to withdraw troops from Afghanistan is foolish. They are
right about that, as far as it goes. To set a date two years in advance for
withdrawing troops from Afghanistan was always absurd. It's like specifying
that a straight line passes through three chosen points: usually there is no
such line.

The surge in Iraq played
little role in ending
the fighting there and the idea makes little sense for Afghanistan. If
there were any chance of winning the war, the deadline would indeed risk
throwing it away.

But since there is no chance of winning, there is nothing to lose by
withdrawing troops starting on some arbitrary date. How about 1 July 2010?

50 in Congress called on Obama not to approve
a pipeline
to bring oil from Canada where it would be made from tar sands. Making oil
from tar sands produces a lot more greenhouse gas than just burning the
oil. To use these tar sands is to refuse to divert the train off the track
that goes over the cliff.

Rangzieb Ahmed was sentenced to life in prison in the UK based on
evidence that
Pakistan wrung out of him by torture, at the UK's
request. Now the UK government is trying to protect its torture
policies from being judged in Ahmed's appeal.

I have no love for Rudd, who wanted to impose filtering on the Internet.
(Maybe the new Prime Minister, Gillard, does too.)
What is clear is that she's an opportunist
who is willing to bow down to business. Australians were fools to
be taken in by business threats.

Pakistanis are angry at the Pakistani army and elite and at the
US. Workers have forced the government to reject an
IMF-imposed austerity
plan.
Some of the demands are impossible. For instance, maintaining
low electricity prices is hard to reconcile with ending shortages.
Part of the answer to "How can I feed my children" has to be "have
fewer children."

Palestinians living in East Jerusalem were not granted Israeli
citizenship when Israel captured East Jerusalem in 1967, only
"residency permits". Israel can cancel these permits for many
reasons, such as if the person goes to work abroad, or to study in the
US. Then these people are
forbidden to live where they were born.

Drug lord Christopher Coke, whose gang fought gun battles with
Jamaican police, was arrested by them as he headed to the US embassy
to
surrender for trial in the US.
Apparently he is
afraid that he will be killed while in custody in Jamaica.

Obama sacked General McChrystal for insubordination, and replaced
him with General Petraeus to show this
means no change in strategy.
However, the result is more public doubts about the strategy.
It's true that Taliban rule over Afghanistan would
be a disaster for women, but the Karzai regime is not much
improvement.
RAWA
condems them both, and rejects the idea that outside intervention is
justified for Afghan women's sake.

Everyone: BP is
preventing the rescue of sea turtles
in an endangered species so it can kill them and they won't be counted.
Sign this petition to allow rescue of the turtles. Burning the oil may be a
good idea, since the oil that is burnt won't pollute beaches and marches.
Whether it becomes substantially more toxic this way, I don't know. But they
can let someone rescue the turtles first.
More information

Two factors causing
decline of bees and butterflies
are known: pesticides and destruction of wild habitat. So it is possible
to take constructive action now in parallel with further research. In the
US, replacing lawns with meadows or gardens will help. It is rare that a lawn
is really needed.

The Democratic senate primary in South Carolina was
apparently rigged.
It was supposedly won by someone who was basically unknown and who did no
campaigning. And there are more discrepancies. The defeated candidate,
Rawls,
will protest the result.

General McChrystal has more or less recognized that the
current US strategy
in Afghanistan is failing.

It is no surprise for me, since it never made sense to presume victory
within one year. It's like sending firemen to a big fire and deciding in
advance that they will have it under control in 3 hours.

I originally supported the invasion of Afghanistan because of the
tyranny and fundamentalism of the Taliban. But some of the Taliban have
mellowed, and Karzai's government is not much less bad. Negotiations are called
for.

The idea of weakening the Taliban before the negotiations sounds
logical. But the Taliban are a guerrilla force, not a state with an army, so what
constitutes their strength is their ability to recruit, not their tactical
situation. They don't care about casualties among their soldiers, or even
among leaders, as long as they can recruit more. What areas they dominate
is less vital for them than whether they can do damage.

The only thing that could truly weaken the Taliban is increased support
among Afghans for the official government, but Karzai is not capable of
inspiring such support. Afghans won't feel loyalty for Karzai, not in one
year and not in ten years.

The giant
Ixtoc oil spill
in 1979 off the Mexican coast was bigger than the current spill — so
far.

Oil from the Ixtoc spill is still present a short distance
under the surface
of beaches and marshes, and still harming sea life. If it is true that
most of the Ixtoc spill oil was collected, burnt, or dispersed, the total
contamination of the shore may already be greater from this spill than from the
Ixtoc spill.

Thus, calls for the US to restore the Gulf coast to what it was are
futile. Nobody knows how to do that. Billionaire Polluter can compensate
individuals for their specific losses, but there is no way it can make things
right again.

Massachusetts citizens: contact your state senator to support the
resolution in favor of
a constitutional amendment
saying that the first amendment pertains to people, not corporations. You
can determine your state senator from
this page.

Using the lever of "You have a choice, but unless you say yes,
your old activities will stop working" is something that Apple has done
before, with malicious "upgrades". Apple ostensibly doesn't force people to
accept the new nasty thing; it just punishes them if they don't.

There are universities that follow the harmful practice of making
their own materials available through iTunes. If you are at such a
university you should organize with others to demand an end to the
practice.

Brash Polluter presented itself as brave for taking risks of causing a
catastrophe. But it did keep its
investors in the dark
about the specifics of these risks and dangers. The investors told it to
do so.

The US supreme court ruled that offering
human rights training
to organizations officially labeled as "terrorist" is illegal.

These
organizations must not be allowed to learn about human rights, because that
would conflict with the "terrorist" picture that the government has
applied to them (perhaps for political reasons).

However, the core injustice of this law consists of declaring groups
"terrorist" without convicting them of a crime. This violates freedom of
association.

"What Congress decided was when you help Hezbollah build homes, you are
also helping Hezbollah build bombs." That is the theory behind the siege
of Gaza, which shows it is wrong, and causes me to lose some regard for
Elena Kagan.

Reportedly even giving them legal representation is illegal. Can that
really be true?

The UK government rebuked an organizition for
making proposals
for a serious effort to save many lives endangered by junk food.

If heart attacks and strokes kill 150,000 people a year in the UK, and
if 10% of those deaths can be prevented by eating better, that's 15,000
lives saved per year. In the US, with its larger population, I'd estimate
100,000 lives saved per year.

Compare the government attitude towards this tremendous danger with its
attitude towards the far smaller danger of terrorist attack. Terrorists
killed just under 3,000 people in the US in 2001, in attacks which have never
been properly investigated, and we got a "Global War on Terror" that was
an excuse to take away our freedom. Fat and salt have killed a million
people in the US since then, but the US government is no more eager than the UK
government to do anything about it. The reason is obvious: the "War on
Terror" was an excuse to do what Bush (and Obama too) wanted to do, while the
War on Fat would be "bad for business."

I thought that methamphetamine
was commonly made near the people who are going to use it. I am surprised to
read it is getting transported so far. I don't know enough about its
effects to have an opinion about it, but it can't be as bad as a military
dictatorship.

I wonder if they would stop selling the drugs if we simply give them
arms they need. It might be too late for that; once an organization gets
hooked on drugs, it has trouble getting off. If so, it would be a sad missed
opportunity.

A
press report
which criticized the IPCC's finding that 40% of the Amazon rain forest
could be threatened by global warming has been retracted. The IPCC's
conclusion was based on properly conducted science.

Retaliating by
attacking civilians is a war crime, and no more acceptable when the victims
are American then when they are Iraqi, Israeli, or Palestinian. But we must
face the fact that US attacks against various countries will inspire
retaliation. If we want the US to be safe from retaliation of various kinds, we
should stop the US from fighting unjust wars.

When these companies tell us the risks of their nuclear plants will be
insignificant, remember that Big Polluter said the same thing about its
undersea oil well. Big Polluter lobbied for and obtained weak safety
standards; then it asked for and was granted waivers not to follow them; then it
cut lots of corners. Its response plan for an accident was bullshit.

I don't trust our government to stand up to the nuclear power industry
any better than it stood up to the oil industry or the banksters. It has
fully accepted the idea of obedience and subservience to big business, so it
tends to "let industry regulate itself". Whatever level of safety these
reactors might be capable of in principle, I won't trust US business to build
them.

Franco, dictator of Spain, gave Germany a
list of Jews
in Spain for future execution.

Franco ultimately didn't join World
War II and didn't kill those Jews, but he killed thousands of Spaniards who
were accused of political opposition. Franco's old supporters still have
substantial power in Spain, and strive to bury the memory of his crimes and
rehabilitate his dictatorship.

The US is using the arrest of Private Manning to
scare people
away from
helping Wikileaks in any fashion. Daniel Ellsberg says he considers Manning
and Assange heroes, and I agree. The members of the US armed forces swear
to defend the constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Manning
has carried out his oath as a true patriot.

He was tragically foolish to tell Adrian Lamo about it — he
should never have told anyone. But that doesn't diminish the honor he
deserves.

Big Polluter apparently
lied to Congress
as well as the public about the rate of spilling of petroleum.

This
sort of cover-up behavior is par for the course with large companies that do
things that endanger public health. The tobacco companies likewise covered
up what they knew about the dangers of smoking tobacco.

6 months before Bloody Sunday in Derry, the same British army unit
killed 11 unarmed protestors
in Belfast.
Now the relatives of those victims call for a similar investigation, and
say that the Army should have known something like this could happen in
Derry because it should have investigated the first such incident.

Shooting people is what soldiers are trained to do. Putting soldiers
into a political disagreement is very likely to result in shooting people who
are not trying to fight. This is what has happened over and over in
Afghanistan and in Iraq.

It is clear that trusting oil companies to obey safety standards is
asking for disaster. Perhaps an elite corps of inspectors, who have the power
to shut down any oil-related installation until it fixes its safety
violations, might make them behave.

I am against surveillance and
tracking of individuals in general, but surveillance is appropriate for certain
activities that expose the world to special risk. So I think every ship
involved in large scale fishing should be required to carry a GPS tracker and
video recorders, so compliance with fishing rules can be positively
checked.

Meanwhile, fishing for bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean should be
banned so stocks can recover. The current policy courts disaster to avoid
making some businesses uncomfortable.

Big Polluter's stockholders have
sued,
claiming the management defrauded them by falsifying an adequate safety
record to inflate the stock price.

It is also interesting that Hayward
promised to focus "like a laser" on safety, but responded to safety-related
questions in Congress by saying "I know nothink, nothink." If that's how he
handles what he focuses on, he is evidently incompetent.

Hayward tried to pass the blame to the company that made the
blowout preventer.
Even if it was partly to blame, that doesn't absolve BP of responsibility
for its corner-cutting, both in the drilling itself and in
preparedness to respond
to a leak.

Kyrgyzstan's interim president Rosa Otunbayeva pledges to
rebuild the city of Osh
and invited the ethnic Uzbek refugees to return. World powers
did nothing
to help end the outburst of fighting and ethnic cleansing, and if it was
engineered by ex-president Bakiyev, he may strike again in another city.

Lawn
fertilizer and pesticides
poison birds, fish, and sometimes children, and their production
contributes to global warming. Replacing them with gardens, trees, wild vegetation,
or even rocks is an improvement.

Prosecutors claim they the Times Square bomber
received funds
from the Pakistani Taliban.

The US has attacked the Pakistani Taliban
dozens of times with missiles from drones, and I think the attacks
continue every week. If they tried to counterattack with the weapons available to
them, that should not be shocking.

This doesn't mean however that they hate us implacably. If we withdraw
the US troops from Afghanistan, and stop the attacks in Pakistan, they will
probably cease to be interested in us.

Is that a reason to withdraw the troops? If we were fighting for
something important there, this would be no reason to stop. It would be craven to
abandon a cause so important that it could justify a war, merely because
the enemy fights back.

Obama is
persecuting government whistleblowers
more than any president before, even Dubya. He does not want us to know
the truth. The search for Julian Assange of Wikileaks is therefore very much
a threat to all of us.

US citizens:
send a message
to Obama about getting the US off its petroleum habit. I added the
following two paragraphs as a personal message:

In practice it is impossible to stop the oil companies from passing
along increased taxes to the public; but we should not wish to stop them,
because higher prices will discourage use of oil, and we need that. We should
increase taxes on all fuels that, when burnt, will release greenhouse
gases.

Requiring new permit applications is not enough to make deep water
drilling safe. Just as we require ships to take on pilots to navigate in
certain congested waters, we should require deep drilling platforms to have
pilots too. This means a government safety monitor must be on the platform (at
the driller's expense) whenever certain operations are carried out, armed
with the power to stop the drilling if he sees anything unsafe.

The NATO forces in Afghanistan have been
unable to cope
with attacks by IED. If it is impossible to win the war, that is not due
to a single weapon. The weapon has its effect in a context. That context is
that Afghans dislike the Taliban but corrupt Karzai inspires no
loyalty.

A miner who told the press about
dangerous conditions
in a Massey mine (not the same one where workers had recently been killed)
was fired just afterward. Massey has a
history of unsafe practices; the
accident in April was waiting to happen, and more will happen if there isn't
a crackdown.

General Motors cars have built-in cell phones, and like many cell
phones, they can be used for
eavesdropping.
A US appeals court ordered the FBI not to do this — only in certain
states — for reasons based on the current design of the system.

I would not get a GM car if I were you. But then, maybe you carry a cell
phone in your pocket which can also be used for eavesdropping. It has that
feature because it has nonfree software in it: the phone company controls it,
and you don't.

Pakistan's intelligence agency
denies
having seats on the Taliban's board of directors, and Pakistan's
government
denies
the president met with imprisoned Taliban leaders. However, if the reason
Zardari doesn't meet with Taliban is that he has ceded control of Pakistan
to the military, that is hardly an improvement.

Everyone:
sign this petition
against allowing a resumption of commercial whaling. Previously I read
that the current proposal was meant to reduce whaling in exchange for
legitimizing the reduced amount as commercial activity. That kind of compromise
might have been a step forward. However, now that it seems Japan expects to
increase whaling, I am sure the proposal was bad.

For
the Big Pollution,
as for the September 2001 attacks, the people trying to be help face
danger from toxic fumes. We know that Big Polluter is mainly responsible for the
disaster in the Gulf, although other companies might be responsible as
well. We still don't know who was responsible for the September 2001 terrorist
attacks — perhaps 20 Saudis, perhaps someone in the Bush regime,
perhaps both, perhaps someone else, because Bush did not allow a real and
honest investigation.

The UK government says it will refuse to subsidize
new nuclear power
plants. The other crucial question is, will it give an indirect subsidy by
protecting them from liability or costs of handling the waste? Without some
kind of large subsidy, nuclear power is totally uncompetitive and nobody will
build it. Investments in renewable power and in energy efficiency are far
more productive.

Bill Gates cites copyright enforcement to
justify Chinese censorship.
Microsoft executives used to call us communists, but they are now
clearly revealed as the ones who support communist-style dictatorship.

Bush took Maher Arar off a flight home to Canada and
handed him over to Syria
to be tortured. Obama told the courts to refuse to give him justice, and
the Supreme Court agreed.

Until the US takes responsibility for its
acts of brutality, it must be considered a rogue state.

International connections through the US only occasionally cause you to
be tortured, but they are always a pain in the neck. I did this once and
learned never to do it again. Why learn the hard way? Avoid connections
through the US.

The copyright industry has set up an "astroturf" or phony grass-roots
campaign for an unjust
Canadian copyright law.
I think their strategy is to generate enough appearance of support for
C-32, which cannot be provably and directly traced to them, so as to provide
an excuse to the politicians who have been paid or bullied to support it.
They will say, "The public seems divided on the issue, so why not do what the
US demands?"

CDM Watch says that the system for trading carbon credits is
being gamed
by business and creates perverse incentives, failing in its goal to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions. The right solution is to tax fuels that will
release greenhouse gases.

One of the team that informed the public about a security flaw affecting
the iBad has been
arrested for drugs
found by a police search. The police refused to state the reason for the
search. I don't approve of selling cocaine (though prohibition makes things
worse). But the specific concern here is that AT&T may have sent the police
on a fishing expedition against him.

HP says this program will be set up to respect privacy,
but that cannot be true. Once HP has collected information about its
customers, it won't throw that information away, and Big Brother (the US
government) will be able to collect it without giving those customers a search
warrant.

We must insist on printers that won't talk to anyone without our
permission.

Normally, if a device is not a normally platform for installing
software, and we don't install any software in it, we can ignore the question of
whether it is implemented internally using software. But not when it can
talk on the Internet on its own accord and implement malicious features. At
that point, we must insist on only running free software inside it.

Israel has set up
a phony inquiry
into the attack on the Mavi Marmara. It's worse than biased — it's
not even allowed to investigate the important questions. Israel hopes
to pass this off as a real inquiry and thus neutralize international
pressure to have one.

Israel also hopes that
allowing jam, halvah, and shaving razors
into Gaza will satisfy international pressure to end the siege, without
any major change such as allowing people to rebuild their damaged homes. An
Italian journalist on a Gaza aid ship says Israel took his passport,
cameras, and credit card — and someone else then
used the credit card,
stealing his money.

Adeeb Abu Rahma faces
criminal charges
from Israel for nonviolent protests against the annexation wall, which cut
him off from his land. Israel holds hundreds of other
Palestinians prisoner
without charges. Even if it's not as many as before, it is a violation of
anyone's human rights.

All the major oil companies had woefully inadequate plans for coping with disasters in the Gulf of Mexico.
However, there are ways of containing an oil spill on the surface, and BP was not prepared to carry them out in a hurry. Its use of
toxic dispersant may have made the damage worse.

Big Polluter
repeatedly cut corners
in drilling, increasing the risk of the explosion which ultimately
happened, in order to cut costs.

Companies generally tend to do this unless
they are convinced they will very likely be caught and punished. Thus, when
the prevailing attitude of government is to bow down to companies and let
them have what they want, the result is danger.

US citizens: phone your congresscritter and senators, calling on them to
protect the Wall Street reform bill's strong derivatives provisions and
close the derivatives enforcement loophole. Make sure to mention your name
and address.

The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.

97 percent of all the "flagrant" safety violations of oil companies in
the US are by
Big Polluter.

I wonder why BP has let hundreds of violations go on so long without
fixing them. Is it because OSHA does not levy sufficiently heavy fines? Or
is it that BP expects to use courts to delay paying them for so long they
may as well be nothing?

Don't be
distracted by arguments
about whether Big Polluter is a British company or an American company.
The real issue (beyond punishing that company, and Halliburton, and all
others responsible), is to reduce fossil fuel use.

To argue whether Big
Polluter is a British company or an American company is irrelevant because the
concept that such a company has a nationality is absurd. They don't think
they belong to a country; they think every country belongs to them. It is
up to us to teach them our countries are not for them to play with.

In other words, every large multinational company is a foreign
company — no matter which country you are in.

Note that Big Polluter was totally responsible for failing to have
the necessary equipment in place — in Louisiana, as in Alaska 20
years ago.

The Big Spill is a consequence of looking for oil in places that are
ever more difficult to get at. The conclusion is, we need to
move away from using oil.

For 10% of US fuel to be biofuel may not be a good thing. Biofuels made
from crops that require water and fertilizer do not really improve
matters; instead they cause starvation in other countries. If and when we can make
fuel from plant waste or weeds, then biofuel will contribute to solving
the problem.

BP may
scrap its dividend,
recognizing it may need to pay that money in fines and damages. The idea
of defending a multinational company on nationalistic grounds is absurd. The
idea of giving it immunity for criminal negligence because some of its
owners are pension funds is also absurd.

Project Prevention pays drug addicts to
get sterilized,
thus averting the birth of thousands of children who would be damaged by
the conditions and circumstances of their birth. A fetus is not yet a human
being, but it could develop into one. If a hypothetical person could have
come into existence but doesn't, there is no possibility of violating that
person's rights. Thus, avoidance of reproduction — whether by means of
abortion, birth control, sterilization, or abstinence from sex —
does not violate anyone's rights. However, causing a fetus to be born with
birth defects or an addiction brings a person into existence and violates that
person's rights.

This project ought to be funded by governments, both domestically and
as foreign aid in poor countries. In a world being greatly damaged by human
overpopulation, and where most people remain in poverty, saving the planet
and ending poverty requires a lot of people to have fewer or no children.
Thus, if we are ever invited to feel sorry for people for not having
children, we should consider the alternative, and decline.

This makes a real difference. Hundreds of people in Gaza have died in
recent years because Israel would not let them leave to get medical care.
Now they have the possibility of going to Egypt for this care. Many others
were blocked from studying at universities in Europe.

However, it does not amount to freedom to leave Gaza, which is a human
right for the people who live there.

Poor countries criticize
a draft treaty
to block global warming, saying that they should be allowed to keep on
increasing their CO2 output after 2020 even though the rich countries will
have to make large cuts both before and after that year.

That position is
the result of short-term thinking. It is correct to stop poor countries
from continuing to increase their greenhouse gas emissions.

Maybe this deal requires too little sacrifice of the rich counties. If
so, that is where it should be changed. If the poor countries cannot afford
the cost of limiting their emissions, the rich countries must pay that
cost.

Mercenary companies
in Afghanistan, paid to guard NATO convoys, are instead bribing the
Taliban; sometimes even staging fake battles with Taliban cooperation. If the
Afghan government and the Taliban are this close, maybe they can make
peace.

Oil is piling up in
marine wildlife sanctuaries,
unimpeded by bungled protective and cleanup efforts. The birds and marine
animals that don't die now will die in the coming months or years from the
toxins.

This disaster was caused by a conspiracy of government and big
oil companies. The oil companies convinced the US government to establish
inadequate safety standards, and then convinced it not to enforce them. The
relevant people in the government were either paid off somehow or
convinced to worship the invisible hand.

Further back, the cause is the US's failure to use energy efficiently.
That too is the result of government collusion with the oil companies ever
since President Reagan.

We cannot survive the existence of companies big enough to gain
effective control of government policy. We need to establish a climate in which
government will not be seduced by the argument that letting companies do
whatever they wish will benefit everyone through economic growth. That is just
Reagan's "trickle-down economics" by another name.

Some of these services should not be used, for ethical reasons —
for instance, Google Docs and Google Translate are
Software as a Service
but there is nothing bad about the rest if you
block the nonfree Javascript programs they try to install.

In the process it has admitted that the spill rate is on the order
of 20,000 barrels a day, much more than BP claimed before.
This is significant because BP will be fined per barrel
and has tried to deny the full amount of the oil.

I wonder if this might have been part of the motive for using a toxic
dispersant: to hide the size of the spill.

One point that isn't made clear — and the previous articles
I read did not say anything about it — is how Sharif Ahmed,
formerly fighting against the US-backed Ethiopian army, became the
head of a "government" which has US support. What happened to the
previous "provisional government" that the US tried to impose despite
its lack of domestic support?

A friend who is helping to rescue birds in the Gulf of Mexico told
me:

When they describe the smell on [TV] it doesn't come close
to the horrible reality of the putrid hot tar odor in all directions. What
would be a comforting ocean breeze carries the smell of a road being newly
paved. I tried to sleep with my respirator on but had to switch to a
bandanna as the other was too uncomfortable on my inflatable
cot.

The Gaza aid ship activists were
shot multiple times;
witnesses report seeing people shot at close range in the head.

I
could hardly blame activists for rushing soldiers that were shooting people
and dropping them down a hatch. The claims that some of the protestors were
threatening to use knives is somewhat more of a concern — if it is
true.

An HBO movie about Neda Soltani has become very popular in Iran despite
jamming and electric power cuts
designed to stop people from getting it. Iran's government calls this
propaganda, and that in some sense is true; but Iranians know the information
in it is basically accurate — unlike their own government's totally
bogus version.

Christian fanatics have found a new basis for organizing:
denying global warming.
This is, in effect, the beginning of an alliance opposed to all rational
knowledge and dedicated to the destruction of the Earth.

The UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings accused the US of
giving the CIA a
"license to kill"
using drones.

I see two issues arising directly from using drones to
attack people in the attempt to kill them. First, is it justified to try to
kill them at all? Second, are drones an acceptable method?

The general answer to the first is it is acceptable to kill the
soldiers of an enemy army, but not mere criminals; states must at least try to
arrest them first. The Taliban in Pakistan falls in a gray area between the
two.

As for the method, that's a matter of how many innocent bystanders are
likely to be hit. Drones are not alone in killing bystanders; rockets fired
from fighter planes do it too, as was shown by a number of Israeli
"targeted killings", and artillery does it too. They can all be unacceptable.

In the long term, the issue of the "playstation mentality" that Alston
raised could be very significant. If killing comes to feel like nothing at
all, people may kill a lot more. Drones are not alone in having this
effect; other high tech and remote weapons do the same. But drones may take it to
a new level.

Some of the activists that were on the Gaza aid ships are
Israeli Arabs.
Unlike the international activists, they remain in prison and face
prosecution. Israel tried to deliver some of the aid that was on the Gaza aid
ships, but not the construction supplies, which are urgently needed to rebuild
houses destroyed by Israel's attack. Hamas
rejected wheelchairs
demanding the construction supplies and freeing of those prisoners. Blocking delivery
of supplies to rebuild homes is inhumane. Blocking wheelchairs that are
available is also inhumane.

Christopher Monckton gives
persuasive-sounding
speeches claiming that the scientific evidence shows there is no global
warming. Professor John Abraham tracked down the references cited by Monckton
and found many of them to be misrepresentations. I wonder if the
scientists who were misrepresented can sue Monckton for libel in the UK.

It is possible in principle for a corrupt and dishonest government to
prevent corruption in the police force, but I doubt the Afghan government
has the will to do so. It would have to pay them a lot more, and that would
leave too little money for others to steal.

Carefully controlled grazing can
revive dying grasslands
in Africa. Burning grass is not bad everywhere; in some places, such as
Australia, plants are adapted to that. But Africa may be different.

I can hazard a generalization from this. Rapid technological progress
implies that people do not have time to determine the long term consequences
of the new methods they adopt. Many of them will therefore have harmful
consequences, and they can build up to tremendous magnitude before people
understand them.

This year will have many hurricanes, and they will make the Big
Pollution in the Gulf of Mexico do
more damage.
Perhaps we need to build a dam from Florida to Yucatan to keep the oil
from polluting the Caribbean Sea and the North Atlantic.

Americans have less
empathy and kindness
than 20 years ago. Relating this to the Internet
is conjecture; I don't think we can tell what the cause is. But the
consequences will clearly be harmful to everyone.

The government of Afghanistan is investigating many
aid groups
on suspicion that they are preaching Christianity, which is forbidden
there. I have no love for proselytizing Christians, but discriminating between
postures on religion violates human rights. It also violates human rights
treaties. The US has no business fighting to support a government in
Afghanistan unless it signs and follows these treaties.

Israeli commandos attacked the Gaza aid ships, killing and wounding the
unarmed activists.
Recent history suggests that the Israeli accounts of the events are likely
to be lies. The Israeli army committed
multiple atrocities
in its attack on Gaza, then
lied about them,
obstructed investigations
such as that of Judge Goldstone then tried to
smear and threaten
those who repeat the criticism. The activists knowingly risked their
lives, in effect telling Israel, "You can keep Gaza in hunger over our dead
bodies." But that doesn't make the activists responsible for the violence. The
activists only tried to bring food, medicine and building supplies to the
suffering people of Gaza; it was Israel that started the fight, and it cannot
justify that.

Oil companies in Nigeria spill oil
just about every day;
the spills add up to around one Exxon Valdez per year. The oil poisons
crops, fish and people, but corporate thugs attack them if the dare to
protest. I agree that the executives together with all the staff personally
responsible, including those in subcontractors, should be tried. If the oil
companies block the trials, these companies should be declared "Wanted, dead or
alive" and wiped out.

French journalist Baudouin Koenig and his sound assistant were
arrested in Indonesia
for filming a student protest in Wast Papua. Indonesia eventually allowed
Koenig to
remain in Indonesia
and continue interviews — but not in West Papua. West Papua was
taken over by Indonesia just as it was given independence by the preceding
Dutch colonial power. Since then, a large number of Javanese colonists have
moved there in a campaign to assure permanent control of the territory.

Pakistani Taliban attacked a mosque of the
heretical Ahmedi sect
and killed 90 people. Even if we treat the Taliban as an aberration, the
previous persecution of Ahmedis shows how Muslim countries despise religious
freedom, and shows a vicious trait in Islam. Christians and Jews have also
engaged in such persecutions over history.

The Big Pollution in the Gulf, which has not been stopped yet, is
turning into
Big Poison:
blowing fumes or droplets make people sick. I don't know how to reconcile
the current news that the leak isn't shut off with the previous report that
the flow had been stopped.

Half a million Iraqis (estimated) are living in illegal
squatter camps.
The number of these squatters is growing rapidly.

When Iraqi refugees
return from other countries, many of them end up in these camps. I would
guess that they returned because they ran out of money and the other
countries did not allow them to work or to squat.

Repeal of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy of the US military towards
gays was
approved by the Senate armed forces commitee. I favor repeal of
this bigoted policy (which has been used to punish servicewomen who
complained about being raped). At the same time, it is hard for me to be
enthusiastic about helping the US armed forces, given the typical uses of US
power.

Business Power in the form of Republican senators blocked an attempt to
increase BP's liability
for the Big Spill. I disagree with the article about taxing oil. This tax
is good since it would reduce oil consumption. It is true that oil
companies will pass it on to the consumer as much as they can, but they would do
the same with any other costs. Meanwhile, if consumers respond by driving
less, the companies won't succeed in passing on all the cost to them.

In Pakistan, even those who advocate
more flexible censorship
are condemned by fanatics. Freedom of expression is something no one dares
advocate.

Islamic countries such as Pakistan do not respect freedom
of speech. They also do not respect religious freedom, since they prohibit
anyone who was Muslim from converting to any other position (perhaps even
including Atheism). These laws are fundamentally unjust and deserve the
strongest condemnation.

Iran is to receive
more sanctions
as it continues pushing to develop nuclear weapons.

The proposed
sanctions are justified, but I doubt they will achieve their aim. I don't think
anything can achieve it, except perhaps to force Israel to the table to
discuss its own nuclear disarmament.

While the US and Europe talk about reducing CO2
emissions, China is really doing something about it.

The dam would make it easy for China to extract more water from the
river, but it could do that without a dam, and it could build the dam without
extracting a lot of water. So it is possible to separate the issue of water
rights from the issue of the dam.

The sediment that now flows to India and Bangladesh will collect above
the dam, and it will have to be dredged out. I wonder if it will be
possible to put the sediment into the river below the dam, so that India and
Bangladesh can still receive it.

The Jamaican government is trying to
capture Christopher Coke,
accused drug trafficker, and it has come almost to war. I have no sympathy
for Mr Coke, whose followers are not above using terror against
bystanders. But this instance is part of a broader phenomenon: the War on Drugs,
which systematically generates people like Mr Coke, and systematically
encourages them to corrupt every government. If we don't end the War on Drugs,
capturing this kingpin will only make another.

You can track the progress of the
Gaza Freedom Flotilla,
which expects to arrive near Gaza on May 28. In case these relief ships
are attacked by Israel, they are
organizing protests
outside Israeli embassies around the world.

US citizens: sign
this petition
demanding televized negotiations between the House and Senate about the
bank regulation bill. The Senate bill is not as strong as it ought to be, but
it is a step in the right direction. The point of this petition is not to
let the banksters ruin it at the last minute.

The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.

Confessions obtained by Iraqi police don't really prove anything
since they are probably obtained by torture. But given the way
the Sunnis who supported the Bush forces got treated, I would
expect all of them to start fighting the regime.

It is sad, though, if they do this by killing civilians. A long-term
civil war in Iraq, or campaigns of murder, may yet be Bush's legacy.

The article describes copyrights as "intellectual property",
apparently quoting the media dinosaurs that demanded this law. They
use that term to confuse people, and confuse is what it does.
People who don't agree with them often use this propaganda term
when talking about them and what they want, thinking that it is
somehow cute or appropriate to quote them.
That is a bad mistake, since it spreads their propaganda.

We cannot be sure whether this remedy really works without a proper
double-blind experiment to test the claim. It is a shame that this
experiment is not being done. To wait decades for the mechanism (if there is one)
to be fully understood and for drugs to be developed is no substitute for
testing this remedy now.

Berusconi has proposed a law to
limit police eavesdropping
. Unless there is some subtle difference that I have missed, these
conditions are much like the ones that applied traditionally in the US, before
"national security" was used as an excuse for more snooping on citizens. The
FBI found them sufficient to convict gangsters. It is ironic that the
impetus comes from Berlusconi, given the bad things he has done; but our disgust
for him is no reason to allow police to plant bugs without sufficient
evidence of a crime.

Australia has imposed
searches on laptops
of travellers and demands they all declare whether they have
"pornography". It will be hard for them even to know the answer. Worse, it is an
opportunity for further government censorship.

Thick sheets of oil have
polluted marshes
in Louisiana where migratory birds stop and many sea animals breed or
mature. This could drastically change the ecology of the whole Gulf of Mexico,
perhaps permanently. If some bird species migrate only via that pathway,
they might go extinct.

The goods and services obtained from nature must be included
in
economic calculations
to show society why it needs to protect nature. The disastrous
consequences of the Big Spill will bring this home to people.

Republican activists' accusations against ACORN were refuted, but they
destroyed ACORN anyway. Now they have targeted the
Greenlining Institute
, which makes banks obey laws against excluding poor neighborhoods from
lending.

Since Israel cannot face the Goldstone report about war crimes in Gaza,
Israel is trying to
discredit
him by saying he was a supporter of apartheid as a judge in the apartheid
period. Nelson Mandela showed his evaluation of Goldstone's service by
appointing him to the Supreme Court.

Iraqi police transported many Sunni prisoners in trucks with poor
ventilation. Some of them
died of suffocation
, and their corpses showed evidence of torture. Some of the prisoners who
died had been held for long periods based on no evidence.

The Palestinian Authority has
prohibited
sale of goods made in Israeli settlements. The settlers are outraged; "How
dare they punish us for stealing their land? Israel should demand they buy
from us!" The boycott of products of the settlements is already widely
practiced in Europe, and has pressured major companies to move operations out
of them.

The new UK government has decided to
review
whether to hand over accused cracker Gary McKinnon to the US for
prosecution.

The article makes the common mistake of using the word "hacker" to
mean "someone who breaks security". That is insulting to us hackers.

What really makes McKinnon's extradition an injustice is that it was
done under a one-sided treaty with the US which bypasses the usual legal
safeguards on extradition. Will the new UK government cancel this treaty?

A Sa'udi woman fought back against a member of the
religious police
and gave him a thorough beating. This article assumes that the identity of
that woman is known to the state, but it is not clear to me that she has
been identified.

Global warming will cause the
extinction
of 20% of lizard species if it isn't stopped soon, because they will have
to rest in the shade all day and and not eat. Polinating insects could have
the same fate, which could be catastrophic.

A nun was
excommunicated
for saving a woman's life: she approved an abortion in a Catholic
hospital. Without the abortion, both the pregnant woman and the fetus would have
died. At 11 weeks of pregnancy, women in the US are allowed to have abortions
at will, if the state or the hospital has not made it impossible.

The UK will eliminate ID cards and limit some other
surveillance
programs. However, there is no word about the surveillance of car travel.
It is important for the UK to bring this up now. And there is no mention of
repealing the laws that make it a crime to be suspected of terrorism.

In an attack on everyone's privacy rights, Sarkozy wants to ban
wearing garments
meant to hide one's face in public.

I sympathize with the goal of
freeing Muslim women from the pressure to wear veils, but I don't think
banning them is just. I also expect the measure to backfire, because the victims
of that pressure will become afraid to leave home. They will become more,
rather than less, isolated from the rest of society.

But the way this is phrased, its impact is not limited to Muslim women.
It attacks the rights of everyone that may want to be anonymous on the
street; for instance, while protesting. Just as terrorists and pornography are
used as excuses for censorship, surveillance, and other repressive
measures, Islamic veils are the excuse to ban any resistance to the total
surveillance state.

The Thai army attacked the protestors and seems to have
crushed the protest.
The human casualties reported seem few for such a large battle. However, I
think democracy in Thailand is the other casualty. The current government
cannot remain in power democratically and is unwilling to let go.

A protest is planned to
pressure Facebook
to respect users' privacy but I think the idea is hopeless. As explained
here
, Facebook's product is info about its users; its real customers are the
companies that take advantage of that info. The pressure on Facebook to
mistreat its users is greater than any possible pushback.

As the Big Spill grows, and fishing is banned in 1/5
of
the Gulf of Mexico
, the head of the MMS continues to defend increased undersea drilling.
Under the current political system of Business Politics (BP), in which the oil
companies use their power to keep the environmental standards weak and
then procure a waiver so as not to follow them, we cannot allow any undersea
drilling, just as we cannot allow construction of nuclear plants.

A UK court ruled that two Pakistanis
suspected of planning terrorism
cannot be deported to Pakistan because they might be tortured by the
government there. However, the court branded them as terrorists based on
evidence they were not allowed to see, which could easily be worthless. And they
face the threat of being placed under house arrest without a trial.

If there is evidence to suspect someone, that is grounds to search his
house from time to time, read his mail, and so on. Under such circumstances
he could not do much harm even if he tries.

When the US kills many civilians in Pakistan, it must expect to
inspire revenge attacks
such as the attempted bombing in Times Square.

I don't think firing
missiles from drones, rather than firing them from fighter-bombers or firing
shells from howitzers, makes an inherently ethical difference. Any of
these weapons can be used against an army, and any can be used to massacre
civilians. What matters is whether they are accurately targeted at enemy
belligerents, and whether this successfully protects civilians. The US argues
that these drone attacks are legitimate war because they are aimed at specific
belligerents, not at civilians. But is that really true?

The information in that article is not conclusive about that point. If
drone attacks as of 2009 had killed 14 "terrorist" leaders (which we can
take to mean leaders of an enemy army) and 700 civilians, were those
civilians few compared with the combatants who were killed, or many?

Unless it is clear that most of those who are hit are belligerents, the
US argument cannot be sustained. If what General McChrystal said about
Afghanistan applies to these attacks too, that "none has proven to have been a
real threat", it would seem the argument is invalid.

There's nothing wrong with sexually explicit images, whether they are
for stimulation or information or whatever purpose. Wikipedia's
purpose is to provide information, so any images which don't serve
that purpose — sexually explicit or not — don't belong
there. However, it would be a mistake to be overly strict in judging
what serves the purpose of informing people.

The Thai government says it will order the
army to attack
the protestors. The protestors support Thaksin, who was elected several
times and ousted each time by the elite. He seems to have the support of the
Thai masses, but there are accusations of corruption against him, and he
presided over
campaigns of assassination
against people accused of drug trafficking.

US citizens: sign
this petition
against some of the harmful parts of the Kerry/Lieberman energy bill.
Here's a
thorough explanation
of the bad provisions of that bill. It amounts to a big handout to nuclear
power, coal and oil.

A Chinese man was freed from prison after the man he confessed to
murdering
turned up alive.

Torture is an effective means of making people confess. If they are
not guilty, that's no obstacle; they confess anyway. Since anyone might be
falsely accused, government torture is dangerous to everyone.

That is why political leaders who conspire to torture must be
prosecuted. Obama, when will you carry out the US's responsibility?

An Afghan prosecutor wants to
arrest a US officer
saying that a US-trained militia killed a police chief. Given the
corruption of Afghanistan, I will not say this accusation is unbelievable. However,
if the militia accused the police of persecuting it, I would not find that
unbelievable either.

The recount of
the Iraqi election
did not change the outcome, but Maliki seems to be trying to make an alliance
with al Sadr so as to remain in power. I have not seen further information about
Maliki's attempts to change the outcome by arresting and disqualifying the
elected MPs of Allawi's party.

US citizens:
Sign
this petition
to the US ambassador to Colombia to protect indigenous and union leaders from a
new paramilitary gang. The old paramilitaries were sponsored by leading
Colombian politicians. I would guess that these are too.

The predatory
Lord's Resistance Army,
chased out of Uganda, now preys on several neighboring countries. A small
amount of US help would enable the permanent defeat and elimination of the gang, but
the US government never seems to have considered it. Perhaps because this gang
is not Islamist.

Paramount, i.e. Viacom, demanded the
deletion of a video
that someone took with his own camera looking at the street outside his office.
Viacom is one of the movie companies that are lobbying to take away your
freedom. If you give these companies any money, you are paying them to attack you.

This is pure distraction, because the volume of water is not
important. What matters is how much oil will arrive on the coast and
the sea bottom.

Then he says BP will fix the leak, and the only question is when.
If it takes them till all the oil leaks out, the job will be easy.

Then he makes a comparison between a leaking oil well and an
unexplained plane crash in the ocean. The plane crash killed only the
crew and passengers; it did not poison the sea. If only the big spill
were no worse than a plane crash.

We need to promote renewable energy, not dangerous uranium and coal
and petroleum. We should strengthen our laws for conservation, by
adding a tax on carbon-containing fuel, not undermine existing
measures such as the Clean Air Act and state laws.

I am not surprised that Zapatero is trying to eliminate
Spain's universal jurisdiction over atrocities. This is
probably the result of US pressure. Obama must fear that
he will be prosecuted for the disappearances carried out
by his regime.

The accused plotters were arrested in Aceh, which was given the
special privilege of establishing Sharia law, as part of a peace
agreement that ended a long civil war. Sharia law does not respect
basic human rights.

Aceh recently adopted a law censoring video and audio broadcasts which
would prohibit anything that goes against Islamic values. The
officials said this did not affect freedom of the press because 'the
press means writing only".

India's
electronic voting machines
are vulnerable to centralized fraud. Several years ago, I read that India's voting machines did not have computers in them, and I thought this might make them safer. So I was surprised to read, in this article, that they contain programmable microcontrollers. I wonder whether perhaps what I read years ago concerned a previous generation of machines.

100 Jewish Jerusalemites signed
an open letter
correcting Elie Wiesel's mistaken notion of the situation in Jerusalem. This response, and Yossi Sarid's, should persuade a reasonable person who reads them. But they don't have rich supporters to present the truth in ads in US newspapers.

A
former CIA officer
says in August 2002 he was told the US had already decided to invade Iraq. He also gave information about CIA torture practices, and evidence that Libby and others gave false testimony about the Valerie Plame leak.

Following their standard practice, Democrats made the bill weak in the hope of Republican support, then did not get any Republican support. If they were serious, they would propose a strong bill, and if the Republicans block it, the Democrats could say, "We tried to do the right thing; vote those Republicans out of office so we can succeed."

So why don't they? Some suggested that the Democrats are using the Republicans as an excuse to surrender to business.

Bil'in protest organizer Abdullah Abu Rahma, imprisoned for 5 months in Israel without charges, has been put in
solitary confinement
for talking to journalists in the courtroom. He was accused of possession of weapons after he collected the spent shell casings of rounds fired by Israeli soldiers, as evidence.

Although the UK realized Paul Chambers had not meant to threaten anyone with
his joke about a bomb
in an airport, it prosecuted him because it could. A threat is a statement of an intention to harm someone, intended to cause fear or worry. Whether it is a threat is a matter of its real meaning, not its superficial form.

For instance, "It would be a shame if your building burned down" does not have the form of a threat. Superficially, it states a sentiment most of us would agree with. But we recognize that in certain contexts it might really be a threat. Contrariwise, "If you touch that cake before tonight I'll kill you" has the form of a threat, but you might say it to your friends knowing they will understand it is really not a threat.

Paul Chambers' tweet had the form of a threat, but everyone knows it wasn't really a threat. Even the prosecutors knew this. So why did they prosecute him? Anyone who read the news about Chambers' arrest would already think twice about saying such things on Twitter. Apparently the prosecutors were determined to make other Britons feel very threatened.

Obama has given up criticizing Karzai over corruption, concluding
it is useless.

I am sure such criticism is useless; Karzai is not going to give up his lucrative corruption over mere criticism.

He knows the US can't make him stop, so he just has to ignore the criticism. The only way to stop the corruption of the Karzai government is to take away Karzai's power; but the US can't do that, because it would puncture the idea that the Afghan government is sovereign and the US is only defending it.

Meanwhile, this article shows a tacit admission that training the Afghan police and army is not succeeding very well. They cannot even control
Marja,
which is an imaginary town in a rural area so they can hardly dream of controlling any place else.

The US may have to do what it did in Vietnam: declare that it is ok to leave, and let its toy government fall.

US citizens: phone your senators to call on them to protect the part of the banking reform bill requiring large banks to move their derivatives departments into separate subsidiaries which are not given Federal Reserve funds or FDIC insurance. Senator Judd Gregg and Senator Chambliss want to weaken it.

For more info.
Also say you support the Merkley-Levin amendment to stop proprietary trading.

US citizens: phone your congresscritter to support the State Secrets Protection Act of 2009, which would limit the use of "state secrets" as an excuse to dismiss the lawsuits of people who have been tortured.

The Trans-Alaska Pipeline was made possible by arranging for Alaskan natives to
sell their land cheap
and become renters, then making commitments to Congress that have not been kept. This wasn't the first time that native land ownership was arranged so that they would lose their land.

What this shows is that the people running the Mineral Management
Service are oil-company flunkies. They think their job is to give the
oil companis what they want, not protect the public. Can anyone find
out who appointed them and when?

Ahmed Karzai gets his patronage power from his personal relationship
with the president. Thus, his corruption is a reflection of the
president's corruption. What's more, it is the nature of this
government — that the president personally controls so much
— that makes it pervasively corrupt. If he were to listen to
someone else instead of his brother, it would only change the identity
of the crony.

But this is surely no accident. Karzai gathered the power into his
own hands so that he could be the center of corruption.

Increasing tax collection from the affluent could be a way
to reduce the austerity. I wonder if the government could
offer that as a kind of deal: get us more tax collection
and we can reduce the austerity.

The Free World will increasingly need to reject computers designed to
be controlled by Hollywood, and use computers which were not designed
to restrict their users. But these are unusual computers, and that is
a problem for people who want to install a free operating system on a
machine that was not chosen with freedom in mind. They find that the
devices in the machine won't run without proprietary software. Often
this is because Hollywood has demanded it.

This problem contributes to the popularity of nonfree GNU/Linux distros that
include the nonfree drivers and firmware for those machines, distros
that weaken our community by corrupting many of its members.

The Hollywood movie companies base their arguments on a false premise:
that they deserve to be able to profit. Since they have attacked our
freedom, what they deserve is to lose everything and cease to exist.

Think of this, next time someone suggests you pay to watch a Hollywood
movie. It's feeding your enemies. If your children are going to
watch, it is bad for them too.

This article spreads confusion when it refers to patents as "intellectual
property", using the terms interchangeably. (I am sure the author
does not realize how harmful that term is as propaganda.)

The EU's attempt to confuse generic drugs with fake drugs is part of
another propaganda campaign, which calls copying "counterfeiting".
ACTA is an instance of that nastiness.

The governments which have confiscated the drugs are evidently more
concerned with corporate profits than with human lives. Their actions
as of this moment endanger people in poor countries, but I am sure
they are just as glad to threaten the inhabitants of their own
countries when they can get away with it.

I suppose Apple did not ask the factory to use that fluid. It just
did not pay attention. With China's corruption, its censorship, and
its general penchant for covering up abuses rather than correcting
them, things like this will happen.

Since Apple produces in large quantities, it is in a position to check
the factories and their manufacturing practices against global
standards — if it makes the effort.

Perhaps the US should have a law holding the visible producer of a
product — its "brand" — legally responsible for harm done
by the manufacturing of the product and all parts made specially for
that product or for that producer. These days, the "brand" gets the
power but sheds the responsibility. With this law, it would have to
take some responsibility too.

In the first line of the message, I delete the text, "Although we
appreciate your public commitment to these principles," because (as
previous notes show) Obama's level of commitment to human rights
so far has been disappointing. But that is no reason not to ask
for improvement.

India sentenced the surviving Mumbai terrorist to
death,
arguing that this would deter other terrorists. The person who argues that the death penalty will deter people from suicide missions is not thinking very hard. The death penalty doesn't even deter ordinary murderers. India should demonstrate its moral superiority, by using life imprisonment instead.

BP's dispersant has
made the oil so thin
it goes under booms. So there is no way to protect vulnerable islands from the spill. Perhaps in 5 or 10 years, BP will argue, "All the wildlife is dead now, and by the time that oil is gone these islands and the current coast will be submerged, so let us drill without any precautions."

Greg Palast: BP has a policy of neglecting safety in order to save money. BP's negligence caused
the disaster in Prince William Sound,
and negligence caused the Gulf of Mexico leak to become a disaster too.

South Africa's
right-wing economic
policies are spreading poverty and shortening life spans. The World Cup offers multinationals a great opportunity because scruffy local vendors are carefully kept away. The venue has been sanitized for foreign tourists by evicting the poor.

Craig Murray was fired as the UK's ambassador to Uzbekistan for complaining that the CIA was providing dishonest
"intelligence" obtained through torture.
The UK government told him that it was ok to get intelligence using torture.

The US government says, "We don't have
the capability
to dive 5,000 feet [1,500 metres] below the surface to do a survey" of a leaking oil well. So why doesn't it have this capability? It seems irresponsible to leave this up to the oil companies. The US government have such equipment ready, in every coastal region where there are offshore wells, as a safety precaution. It should make the oil companies pay the cost of buying and maintaining the equipment, and employing its crew.

Shahzad, the would-be Times Square bomber, reportedly
admitted links
with al Qa'ida and the Taliban. If this is the Taliban's retaliation, it would have been tantamount to a pinprick on an elephant — insignificant compared to all the murders that occur daily in the US, let alone all the other premature deaths. We do want the police to investigate such attacks, but we should give them no leeway from respecting the rights of citizens.

A woman in Italy has been fined for
wearing a burka.
Now her husband says he won't let her leave the house. I sympathize with the wish to liberate women from the burka, but this direct approach does more to vent hostility than to cure the problem.

It is no coincidence that the Italian law was aimed at repression of dissent. Laws requiring people to leave themselves always open to identification are a threat to everyone's rights.

Bita Ghaedi, likely to be murdered or even executed if she is forced to return to Iran, has won a temporary
reprieve from deportation
at the last minute. That such a clear candidate for asylum has to fight in court demonstrates the cruel absurdity of today's asylum policies.

The UK may be sued for participating in
use of chemical and radioactive weapons
in the destruction of Falluja. The US is the main culprit for this atrocity, but only the UK can be sued because the US government totally rejects its responsibility. While this policy was started by Bush, who was also responsible for the attack itself, its continuation is Obama's fault.

3,000 prominent European Jews
call for an end
to the occupation of Palestine, saying that the only way for Israel to survive is to allow a "viable and sovereign" Palestinian state and make peace with it.

Greek protestors
occupied the Acropolis.
More importantly, they have called a general strike. Only an evil government puts the burden of national sacrifice mainly on the poorest. But that's what the EU stands for.

Israel continues
imprisoning protestors
against the annexation wall. And shooting protestors in the head with tear gas canisters. The soldiers know what they're doing — you don't hit people in the head by accident. But Israel's army
lets them off the hook
with investigations as phony as the 9/11 Commission.

Ahmad Asfour received permission to leave Gaza and go to a hospital in Israel for major medical problems. But at the crossing, Israelis arrested him.
Now in prison,
he is being denied the medical care to save his life.

The film
Lebanon
gives a tank-soldier's eye view of in Israel's first invasion of Lebanon. The director is trying to expiate his guilt for killing someone (an enemy? a civilian?) with his tank gun. If you watch movies, it would be interesting to compare this with The Hurt Locker.

US citizens: call both your senators to support the Merkley amendment. It will eliminate a nasty provision in the Senate financial reform bill that would allow the US treasury to arbitrarily abolish state consumer protection laws for insurance. More info about this nasty provision is available in
a pdf.

You can also send a message through
this campaign
but a phone call carries more weight.

Evidence that animals can have feelings should not make us rush to conclusions about
what those feelings are.
For instance, if some animals really do want privacy when mating, they might very plausibly care only about their own species, considering humans insignificant as long as we do not pose a threat.

If an animal does have feelings, that starts rather than ends the discussion of whether and when we ought to cater to those feelings. We don't believe we should cater to other humans' feelings in all cases; we have codes of when we ought to. These codes are based on putting ourselves in the other's place. Within one species, it is feasible more or less to do that. It becomes far more problematical with another species that we cannot talk with.

RAWA fights
an underground battle
for women's rights in Afghanistan. RAWA's integrity is demonstrated by its opposition to the Communist regime, to the warlords, to the Taliban, and to Karzai. All of them richly deserve it.

It is no surprise to me that some criticize RAWA for being "too radical" for standing by principles we all agree with, and call it "ineffective" even though it apparently achieves things no one else has been able to. Those are the standard criticisms to make against organizations that stand by their principles; the FSF receives them too.

The BBC made a
cowardly apology
for a comedian who criticized the Israeli occupation of Palestine. There was a small amount of validity in the criticism of his joke. By saying "an angry Jew" he added an element with shades of antisemitism. If he had said "an angry Israeli" he would have avoided it. However, I don't think this point is significant enough to call for an apology. It is just a suggestion.

Some forms of gonorrhea are
becoming resistant
to all the available antibiotics. While at one side, the bacteria are developing resistance to the antibiotics they encounter, at the other side the big pharma companies are not developing any new ones. No new antibiotics have been developed in a long time. A new antibiotic is not as profitable as a treatment which aleviates but doesn't cure a chronic condition. Liability factors also enter the issue.

The Boy Scouts
protected pedophiles
just like the Catholic Church. This seems to be a general phenomenon of institutional dynamics: the organization protects the people who work for it against accusations from the public they serve.

The
oil spill
from an undersea well near Louisiana has reached the coast, and could exceed the Exxon Valdes spill before it is shut off. Cleanup efforts are failing because the available methods don't work well.

Exxon never paid
the damages levied against it for the Exxon Valdez oil spill. It kept delaying for years and eventually got out of it. I wonder if BP will be able to do likewise. Meanwhile, the cleanup was not very effective; oil residue remained many years later, hidden under rocks. This specific disaster was an accident, but like most serious accidents, various acts of negligence paved the way for it. It seems that BP did not take all the usual precautions. However, offshore drilling inherently carries a risk, so it has to be recognized as dangerous. Obama wants to do more drilling, which means, more danger.

If you have a Democratic senator, phone and say, "The Republicans don't support the climate bill anyway, so get rid of the foolish compromises put in for their sake. If you can't pass the bill, show Americans a bill worth fighting for. Take out the provisions that limit the EPA and the states."

Corporate political campaigns focus on
pushing emotional buttons
with irrelevant points, and even outright lies — they have no scruples about what to say to gain their ends.
Sometimes they heavily advertise web sites that frame issues in ways that define a problem as only individuals' fault, shifting responsibility away from the companies and laws that systematically encourage the problems.

Obama is getting his economic advice from
Larry Summers,
who under Clinton blocked regulation of risky new investment vehicles and thus caused the economic crisis. Chomsky's recent speech explained that the banksters have a lot of control over Obama. Maybe that is why his advisor is Summers. Perhaps an outpouring of public hostility to the banks will make some progress possible. On the other hand, if Obama really wanted to fix the problem, he could have fired up this public hostility and gained a victory with which to build deeper support than banks' money could have given him.

Israel released a Palestinian prisoner (whose sentence was over), then
forcibly took him to Gaza,
while his family waited in the West Bank for his return. The reason this is so bad is that Israel prevents nearly all travel from Gaza. People cannot leave even for medical care. Hundreds of seriously ill Palestinians have been killed by
this policy,
which amounts to mass murder.

Reportedly
Netanyahu promised the US to stop construction in areas annexed to Jerusalem, but is encouraged to keep saying he didn't agree. If it's good enough for the Palestinians to start talks, I won't object.

Frontline interviewed
a supporter of real, single-payer health reform and edited the interview to give the impression he was talking about a mere "public option". A similar thing happens to me when the media affixes the label "open source" to me or my work.

The war against the Taliban continues in Pakistan. A Taliban leader who was reported killed appears to be
still alive.
In a guerrilla movement, no one leader is crucial. The US killed the previous leader last August; that did not affect the Taliban much. If it did kill this leader, that would not affect the Taliban much either.

The lies Bush used to launch a war of conquest have been
exposed,
but Bush and those who supported these lies have yet to be punished.

I disagree partly with the article's interpretation of Roosevelt's actions in 1941. While the Japanese attack was not in fact a surprise, it was a real attack and Japan intended it as a surprise. The policy that "provoked" this attack consisted of economic sanctions against a country already involved in a war of aggression and conquest.
See also.

The UK police
killed a protestor in 1979,
and hid for 30 years the results of an investigation that ascertained policemen had killed him. I am not surprised that other policemen lied to cover up what happened. That is typical gang behavior. The comrades of the policeman who attacked Peter Watts lied too.

US citizens: if you have a Republican senator, call to say, "Bring the financial reform bill up for a vote." And
sign this
to call on the CEO of Goldman Sachs to call of the filibuster by the senators that the banks have bought.

It is good that Watts won't immediately go to prison. (I am not sure how long the judge can maintain the threat to send him to prison later.) But this is not justice. Justice would be to put the border guards on trial, apologize to Watts, and change the law. Until this is achieved, we should keep the pressure on — for instance, more signs like
"Unprovoked Beatings Ahead".
The basic question here is whether the US should be a country of servile people, who jump to obey the orders of authorities, or the land of the free. The law under which Watts was convicted calls for the former. If Americans do not want to be servile, they should refuse, when on juries, to convict anyone of a crime for not hurrying to obey.

A
large boycott
of Arizona is being organized to protest its harsh law to control illegal immigration.

I do not oppose the US laws that require permission for immigration. (Instead I oppose the US policies that impoverish other countries and drive their inhabitants to emigrate.) However, allowing police to stop anyone and demand proof of citizenship, or proof of whatever, is dangerous to everyone who is lawfully in the US.

The discussion of this issue is handicaped by the presupposition thet
all experience is divided into "disease", which should be cured, and
"normal", which people are supposed to accept. This is an artificial
choice between two extremes.

Let's accept that "normal" female sexuality includes a wide range of
levels of desire, including zero. So there is no reason for any woman
to feel there is "something wrong with her" on account of how much or
little she wants sex.

With the judgmentalism removed, what remains? Personal preferences
only. If you wish you had more sex drive — or less — and
a pill can do it for you safely, why not take it?

I have no sympathy for spammers, but I'm more worried about
abuse of government power than about spam. Just look at the
pol notes of recent years and you'll see lots of things done by
the US government that are far worse.

Amazon is doing the right thing on this occasion, but we cannot be
sure it will always try. We also cannot be sure it will win, because
the legal protections for Amazon's list are weak. If someone
whispered you are a terrorist, I am sure the FBI would find a way
around them.

It is not acceptable to depend on Amazon for this, or on anyone else.
We should buy our books only with anonymous payments.

I don't have any simple solution to suggest, but let's recall that
many of these conflicts are fueled by business. Many of Africa's
recent wars are funded by selling minerals for manufacturing and
jewelry. The businesses involved use influence on servile states
(such as the US) to achieve their ends (this is
visible in Haiti).

Thus, one way to attack this problem is to fight against the power of
business. Support parties and politicians that are ready to adopt
needed measures regardless of corporate profits.

The former Kyrgyz president's PR man was
arrested for money laundering
for the ex president, and was denied medical treatment and contact
with a lawyer.

I have no way of judging the accusation of money laundering against
him. Doing private PR work for the government or the president should
arguably be illegal, but it probably wasn't. But whether or not he is
guilty of a crime, the suspect should receive medical care and should
be able to meet with a lawyer

Uri Avnery: the Israeli right wing, increasingly dominant in Israel,
openly attacks those that stand for peace, reviling them as
"traitors", "enemy agents", "destroyers of the fatherland".
These terms remind him of the rage propaganda of the Nazis,
whose effects he experienced before fleeing Germany.

I don't believe anything can stop heroin production in Afghanistan
other than reducing world demand for heroin. The only civilized way
to do that is the way the Netherlands has done it: by letting
registered addicts get their fix in a doctor's office.

Ezili Danto, formerly the Haitian offical in charge of coordinating aid,
writes about how the aid state uses the poor as an excuse while keeping them down. You'll need to follow that link, indicate you're not a spammer, then view the message from April 16, 2010. You can also reload this link after you "indicate you're not a spammer" to go straight to the page.

The shutdown of commercial flights in Europe was a disaster caused by
regulatory overcaution:
small jets kept flying the whole time, with no problems at all, but the regulators didn't care. The only way to fully avoid risk is to be dead.

To deal with many other real but small dangers, governments propose to reduce our freedom, even down to zero. This time they got a bigger outcry, because they caused billions of dollars in economic damage instead of damaging our freedom. The regulators will surely reconsider this issue.

This example shows that if we gave a similar outcry about attacks on our freedom, we could make them reconsider those too.

The IMF proposes
two new taxes
on financial activities. This may be a good idea, but I am skeptical about a tax on banks' "profits" because they can twist the accounting so as to disguise the profits. A tax on transactions would prevent that.

A
new book
analyzes how extreme economic and social inequality is propagated in the wealthy countries which are most unequal. Society and government act in directions that excuse and maintain the inequality.

The book is specifically about the UK, but I expect much of what it says must apply to the US as well.

A global warming denialist
won a lawsuit
for the publication of a large data base of measurements. These scientific data should be published. Professor Baillie's objections are based on selfishness, not science. Scientific conclusions and analyses must be independently tested; that is the only way we can eventually rely on them.

The fact that the plaintiff in this case is a denialist means he may try to confuse the issue with misguided analysis, but practicing secrecy is the wrong response.

Darryl Durr faces execution, and the State of Ohio has
blocked DNA tests
that could prove he was falsely convicted 22 years ago. This shows a government which will murder people to avoid admitting a mistake. Unfortunately many governments are like that. The US government plans to send Peter Watts to jail for 2 years to avoid admitting that its border bullies commited violence for no reason.

A Philadelphia school spied on many of students through
laptop cameras,
not just a few, and has no excuse to offer. If the software in a computer isn't free/libre software, that means someone else controls it — so you can never tell when it is transmitting photos of you, or transmitting audio recordings of you.

Israeli "settlers" who have occupied a Palestinian home near Jerusalem tried to
frame one of the international supporters
for attacking the settlers with gas. Fortunately there was clear proof
that the accusation was false. Soldiers arrested international
solidarity workers who accompany Palestinians trying to farm their
fields.

The solidarity workers serve as witnesses in case "settlers" attack
the Palestinians. The soldiers arrested them because they
want no witnesses to the attacks.

Uri Blau wrote
an article before Israel's attack
on Gaza which was censored in an unusual way, and remains censored a year after the attack. This creates suspicion is that the article revealed plans to commit war crimes. That the standard military censorship process had already passed the article is more evidence that the motive for censoring it was not about revealing legitimate military secrets but rather illegitimate ones.

The threat to prosecute Israel's best investigative journalist and the pressure to close Haaretz mean that fascism in Israel is inches away from putting an end to criticism of the government. If that occurs, the "only democracy in the Middle East" will be no more of a democracy than Iran is.

I hope that the editors of Haaretz will not allow a submissive newspaper to be published under that proud name.

If Uri Blau continues to face prosecution for whistleblowing if he ever returns to Israel, I think his best option will be to apply for political asylum as a persecuted journalist.

Israel
seized water pumps,
cutting off water supply to a Palestinian village. For decades, Israel has taken the water resources of the West Bank away from Palestinians. When an Israel official says "they get water from us", he is talking about water sources that Israel took from them.

Pervasive and increasingly
overt racist propaganda
is pushing most Israelis toward right-wing parties. However, the majority still would like to end the occupation of Palestine (or most of it, at least).

Way to go, Kai! I would have written a more forceful condemnation of the bullies at the border, but that's just a detail — the important thing is that he has started real action to push back against them.

I hope to hear of more such signs in the future, not just at this
border crossing but at any and all of them, until US pardons Peter
Watts and puts the border gangsters on trial.

For the story of how the US border guards attacked Peter Watts,
see here.

The organization
J Street
fails to seriously oppose Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians, and criticizes efforts to do so as "anti-Israel".

This,
I think,
is the statement by J Street. This doesn't directly call any organization "anti-Israel" but does describe the Berkeley ASUC resolution in that way.

Here's
the UC Berkeley ASUC resolution:
This text shows that J Street's criticism misrepresented the resolution. It boycotts only companies that support Israel's violence towards and occupation of Palestine. It is not in any way against Israel in general.

To recognize the problem is a necessary step towards solving it, but doesn't guarantee a solution exists. NATO and the US were unable to stop Karzai from obviously rigging the last election, so can it do anything to reduce his corruption?

An Italian charity providing medical care in Afghanistan says
some of its doctors have been arrested.
There was a news report that some Italian doctors were accused of an assassination plot, but Karzai's government has refused to give Emergency any information about the prisoners.

The Italian doctors and most of the clinic staff have been released,
but the clinic remains closed.

The
Spanish enclave of Melilla,
on the coast of Africa, accumulates would-be illegal immigrants that cannot be deported and in practice cannot leave. It is clearly wrong for border guards to shoot to kill. There are many nonlethal means they could use to arrest people trying to cross the wall. But aside from that, I don't have any simple recommendation for this sad situation.

I don't believe that everyone in the world has a right to move to Europe, or the US for that matter. I have no sympathy for the Bangladeshis that paid smugglers to help them illegally enter Europe and were cheated, and even less for the fools who continued to pay more to those who had cheated them. However, the force that drives them and other would be immigrants to go to Melilla is the poverty of their own countries.

A major cause of poverty is rapid population growth. The responsibility for this is shared — between the local people (particulary the men, who typically have the power) that want to have many children, and the wealthy countries that don't give enough contraceptive aid.

Another cause is corruption, which is rooted in local culture, though often exacerbated by foreign companies.

However, the poverty of Africa, and even Bangladesh, is partly due to an economic system that the rest of the world has set up. We have a responsibility to stop sucking the wealth out of those countries, and stop the increasing concentration of wealth in the world.

Police in Kyrgyzstan used "unauthorized copies of software" as an excuse to
shut down a TV station
which was broadcasting news about protestors.

I was disappointed that the article uses the propaganda terms "pirated" and "Intellectual Property". The latter term is so misleading that even quoting a name in which it appears spreads confusion if you don't deconstruct the term. See
here
for more information.

Also, to say that "software piracy" is a "legitimate problem" whitewashes the real problem: proprietary software which forbid redistribution.

Brazil used unauthorized copies of software as an excuse in the 90s to arrest activists of the landless rural workers' movement. In that case, the copies really were unauthorized, but that didn't alter the effect. To protect themselves, they moved to GNU/Linux. Everyone else should do that too.

I have no sympathy for the FARC, but we must not let them be used to
distract us from the worst terrorists in Colombia. Those are the
paramilitary thugs supported by
President Alvaro Horrible, and the regular army troops who murder
civilians at random and
dress the corpses in FARC uniforms to claim a
bounty. The US calls FARC terrorists,
while supporting Horrible and his terrorists.

Spain, by contrast, is a real democracy and not a terrorist state,
which makes the violent separatism of ETA totally inexcusable.

So it is very disappointing to see a credible accusation that Chavez's
government is mixed up with these groups. President Horrible accused
Chavez of supporting the FARC, but he is too dishonest for his
accusations to carry weight. A Spanish judge cannot be thus
dismissed. This is not yet proof, but it must be considered
seriously.

There is plenty of evidence that the Catholic Church protected
pedophile priests from prosecution. What I have read so far does not
convince me that the current Pope was directly, personally involved in
it. He refused to grant a pedophile priest's request to leave the
priesthood, but that doesn't imply protecting him from prosecution
(which did happen) or allowing him to work with children in the future
(though that too seems to have happened).

The biggest obstacle to the practice of prosecuting official crimes
against humanity or the ecosystem is US opposition. The Bush regime
pushed hard to oppose this (since many of its officials are candidates
for such prosecution). Bush made many countries protect US soldiers
from prosecution in the ICC.

It is possible to let people develop sexuality at their own pace,
provided we do not interpret that as meaning they develop without
social influence. Society will inevitably have some effect. Since
sex is basically enjoyable and good, it's better for society to
encourage people to have sex than to discourage it.

What seems thoroughly harmful is the effect of bullying, and more
generally, peer pressure with its threat of rejection. I was immune
to that, perhaps because I considered rejection inevitable, but
what it does to other people (even adults) seems to be totally
twisted. I wonder if there is any way to break its influence
on most people.

It seems Microsoft closes its eyes to these violations of its
"code of conduct", which apparently is meant more to give a positive
impression than to avoid the abuses.

The fact that people work in this factory voluntarily (and that they
can leave when they choose) reflects the great poverty of most of
China. It is good that the fectory allows people to quit, but that is
no excuse for permitting working conditions as found there. If the
workers were paid decent wages, the products would cost a little more,
but they would still be made, and workers would still be hired to make
them. However, the owners of Microsoft and the other "manufacturers"
that use these factories would not get so much money.

It used to be that workers could form unions to demand better pay and
working conditions. I am sure Microsoft is happy to have moved the
production to a country which doesn't allow that. That's what the WTO
was meant for.

An independent inquiry concludes the Climatic Researcher Unit
scientists acted honestly
and were basically right in their science. Although this rejects the accusations of the corporate-funded denialists, they don't have to care. They have succeeded in misleading millions of people to disbelieve global warming. Billions will probably suffer the resulting damage.

A
full interview with Josh Stieber, a Bush forces soldier in the unit
whose troops callously shot Iraqi civilians and journalists, who later
became a conscientious objector after he couldn't reconcile considering
all Iraqis enemis with the idea that he was liberating them.

If the radio stations of the "government" and the UN are the only ones
with some music, they might gain some popularity from this. If so, it
would be the first time the "government" ever had any. What the US
achieved by having the Ethiopian army intervene in Somalia was to
replace peace under the Islamic Courts Movement with war and the
danger of something more extreme.

The drug dealers of Mexico are a real threat to society there, but a
total surveillance society is not an acceptable response. The way to
solve this problem is through legalization of drugs, at least of their
transport through Mexico.

Pakistan's army never admits killing civilians. That's even worse
than the US army, which often denies having killed civilians but does
sometimes finally admit it when proof is presented.

If the information given in this article is accurate, these civilians
were killed by accident. It is impossible to totally avoid such
accidents. Therefore, when they happen, the army has to admit them
and apologize humbly. It also has to try to find ways to reduce such
accidents in the future. If it does this, the people may put up with
some level of civilian casualties if they support the war aims.

That labeling would be false and should be rejected. But I do not
see how it would lead to censorship of such criticism, unless Canada
either has or will adopt censorship of antisemitic views. If so, that
would be an injustice much bigger than this issue. Even bigoted views
that we despise must not be censored. I support activities to reduce
bigotry, but not through censorship.

A
secret Israeli database
says 3/4 of "settlements" (i.e., colonies) have done construction without permits, and many built on private Palestinian land. All of these colonies violate the treaties that prohibit seizing land in conquered countries.

7 million Iraqis, over 20% of the population,
live on under 2 dollars a day
This is mostly thanks to the conquest and occupation of their country, but I think Iraq has a high rate of population growth, which also contributes to poverty.

Kyrgyzstan's President Bakiyev
sold off nearly all the state's assets
at low prices to his family's cronies. Kyrgyzstan should seize the former state assets that are physically in the country, such as the telephone company, and tell the new "owners" they can try to collect from Bakiyev.

Constance McMillen was allowed to bring her girlfriend to the prom, but it turned out to be
a separate-but-equal prom
for a few students rejected by the rest of the senior class. These actions show the other students to be prize bigots. However, let's not get caught up in the idea that these parties are important. There are many opportunities for bigotry in private life, parties with no connection to a public school. Bigotry in those events cannot be addressed by legislation or lawsuits, only by greater maturity.

The US government has targeted Anwar al-Awlaki for
"capture or killing".
This could mean that the US will try to arrest him, trying to achieve this without harming him. If there is evidence he is part of a group that is sneakily arranging murder far away, that is grounds to charge and arrest him. But has he been indicted?

Arresting him should be feasible. Such a group is not a combat unit and isn't trained to fight like one. Police can arrest the whole group, without hurting them unless they resist.

However, this announcement could also mean that the US might decide to kill him with no attempt to arrest him. Even if he is guilty of planning murder, but he has a right to a trial, not summary execution based on an administrative order. And what if he isn't guilty? Accusations are often mistaken.

Israeli and US targeted assassinations have repeatedly shown that they are likely to kill many family members and bystanders. A missile doesn't give any warning; it doesn't offer the other people in the house or the street a chance to leave. The US is risking committing a worse atrocity than anything Awlaki is suspected of.

The UK government
adopted blockage of web sites,
and punishment by disconnection of people that share files. This shows that both the Labour and Conservative parties serve business against the citizens.

Rep. Duncan says,
abolish the US Air Marshal service
because it accomplishes nothing. With four arrests per year, it has made around 40 arrests in the past decade. If one of those arrests prevented the destruction of an airplane, it might justify the cost. But I recall hearing that the air marshalls ever played a crucial role in preventing such an attack.

The US government has no intention to prosecute the Bush forces soldiers
who shot civilians and journalists for no reason.
The US government says its rules do not permit gratuitous killing, but these rules are worth nothing if it winks at soldiers who flagrantly ignore them.

Karzai and the US government are
openly condemning each other.
This situation is full of irony. The US is trying to make the Afghan government stop being corrupt and stop making the elections a joke, so the Afghan people will respect it. But if the US achieves this by taking control, it will mean that the government is a puppet, not a democray, and they won't respect it.

In South Vietnam, the US replaced several governments through military coups, but that never resulted in a government anyone could respect. Now Afghanistan is in the same spot. I think the US government sees this and has no idea where to go from here.

The people came onto the streets to
fight the government of Kyrgyzstan,
after the government had opposition leaders arrested. Over 50 protestors were killed, but
they seem to have won
the battle. I am concerned that Obama will try to put the president back in power so as to keep using the airport. The US supports compliant dictators in many countries, and might be glad to support one more.

A short-term solution is to block the Douglas Shoal physically so that
ships will never try to cross it again. But if we don't reduce CO2
emissions, the whole reef will die in a few decades from the
acidification of the ocean. What's needed in the long term is to put
a heavy tax on coal, and thus decrease the amount of CO2 emissions.

The US government lied persistently about what happened there, despite
having the video as proof.

This is what happens when an army of occupation faces resistance. The
soldiers, or at least many of them, consider the occupied people less
than human. They kill civilians for their sport, then lie to make it
seem justified. The commanders repeat the lies, perhaps after giving
advice about what to say. The civilian government presents the lies
as justification for the occupation.

The soldiers who killed these civilians should be tried for murder.
Everyone responsible for covering up the crimes should be tried as an
accessory. But those are secondary to a much larger crime.

The worst culprits responsible are Bush and all those who helped him
launch the invasion of Iraq, based on lies. Murder like this,
probably repeated thousands of times, was contained in the orders that
Bush gave. Those responsible should be tried for crimes against the
peace, as were the Nazis who launched the invasion of Poland.

Thank you, Wikileaks, for thwarting the effort to cover up these
crimes.

Almost a year after the end of the civil war in Sri Lanka, 75,000 Tamils with no connection to the LTTE are
still in prison camps.
I wonder what it takes for villages to be declared "cleared". If it is a matter of clearing them of mines, that does take time, but why keep people in prison until their villages are safe? Is there any information about what the Sri Lankan government says it means to "clear" a village, or about what it is really doing?

China
refused Bob Dylan permission to play concerts. I link to this because the criticism of Björk is an example of a common phenomenon in which those who don't self-censor are criticized for "making trouble" for others. The censorship of Dylan is not Björk's fault, it is China's fault.

The Sunni militias that Bush supported to oppose al Qa'ida now face arrest from the Iraqi government and
assassination in their beds by someone.
The killers might be al Qa'ida, but it occurs to me that they also might be Shi'ite militias. I see no real evidence in this article about their identities.

A judge ruled that NSA wiretapping of a US charity without a warrant
was illegal.
However, there needs to be a way to enforce this even when the government doesn't unwittingly admit the crime.

As the recent airplane bombing attempt shows, the weakness of our defense against non-state-sponsored terrorism is not in the ability to collect information; it's in the ability to use the information already being collected.

US citizens:
sign this petition
calling in Obama to stop invoking "state secrets" to deny justice to the victims of illegal NSA wiretapping. I suggest adding something to the effect that this applies to ALL such cases, and the US must not try to sabotage them by hiding evidence of spying and then saying "You can't prove we did."

Code Pink fooled journalists with a
hoax press release
in the name of AIPAC condemning the Israeli construction of "settlements" in Palestinian territory.
One result
is that AIPAC was forced to say it supports this land grab.
A statement from Code Pink
about this and other actions at AIPAC's meeting.

Having imprisoned the opposition presidential candidate, Sri Lanka's President Rajapaksa has left
no room for defeat
in the legislative elections. After editor
Lasantha Wickramatunga
was assassinated, his posthumous editorial blamed Rajapaksa for organizing the murder.

An Israeli whistleblower/journalist
faces a trial for treason,
which the media are forbidden to report on, while another journalist has fled into exile. These journalists revealed how the army carried out assassinations in defiance of a court order. The Israeli government, rather than prosecuting the perpetrators of these crimes, seeks to crush the people who revealed them.

It is common for governments to use twisted excuses to crush people who expose government crimes. Consider, for instance, the Pentagon Papers case in the US, which also involved publication of leaks of government documents which showed horrible government crimes.

Consider also the case of the
Japanese Greenpeace activists,
who face prosecution in Japan because they intercepted stolen whale meat and handed it in to the authorities.

The US refuses to
certify Bolivia's cooperation
in the "War on Drugs" based on arbitrary standards that come down to politics: Colombia is a US client state and Bolivia refuses to be one.

I mostly agree with this article's recommendation about dealing with drugs. However, for addictive drugs such as cocaine and heroin, another option is to let addicts get their drugs legally from doctors but not legalize general public sale. This can be more effective at reducing the use of these drugs.

A description of
Russian atrocities in Ingushetia.
Whether they were the reason for the Moscow subway bombings, or just a handy excuse, it is clear that years of Russian atrocities created the motivation for them.

If we do not believe that Russian atrocities in Chechnya and vicinity justify suicide bombings, we must not passively accept Russia's argument that these suicide bombings justify the far larger Russian atrocities that will surely follow.

Simon Singh's
appelate victory
is not the end of the story. He still faces several more years before a possible victory in his libel suit. He explains why libel reform is still urgently needed in the UK.

Cape Town is building an expensive shiny new face the soccer World
Cup. To do so, it is
evicting the poor and sending them to conditions
worse than under apartheid.

Big sports events such as the World Cup and the Olympics are big
business. They typically get funding from business-subservient
governments, which justify the subsidy by claiming the event will
bring money into the region. But the money benefits certain
businesses only, and the rest of the inhabitants have to pay for the
trouble.

Every city's inhabitants should resist any plan to hold a major
sports event there.

Republicans are
being pilloried
for accusing Democrats of making back-room deals in the health insurance bill. The Democrats made a number of nasty back-room deals — with Republican legislators, in a futile and idiotic attempt to gain their support. And then, when Republicans did not keep their side of the deal, the Democrats stuck by their side. What a shame.

There was another back-room deal,
with the big pharma companies, granting them privileges in exchange for not lobbying against the bill.

Hollywood has begun making the occupation of Iraq look good by
portraying Bush forces soldiers as heros.
The Bush forces were taken from the US military, as well as from companies such as Blackwater, and sent to carry out an unjust war of conquest. Although many Americans criticized the war once it started going badly, they mostly continued to "support the troops", and thus bought into the fiction that these occupation troops, as they killed and tortured civilians, were "serving their country".

Of course, my point is not Pinkerton's point. He is a hawk;
he lauds unjust wars of conquest and lauds Hollywood for supporting them.
I condemn them both.

This article says that Pinkerton misrepresented the films he is talking about.

Egypt is very repressive; many Egyptian journalists and bloggers
have been arrested for opposing the government. Is it really possible
for anyone to challenge Mubarak in an election? Perhaps Baradei hopes
at least to focus world attention on the lack of democracy in Egypt.

While I feel little sympathy towards the use of the burqa, religious
motives are not the only reason to hide one's face. Protestors may
not want the police to know who they are; this law will harm the
political rights of everyone in Belgium.

Beyond that, hiding one's face is the only way to be anonymous in a
society filled with face recognition cameras. The burqa, a detestable
symbol of subjection, provides a convenient excuse to expose everyone
to total surveillance. Big Brother would love this law.

Suicide
bombings in the Moscow
subways have been attributed to independence campaigns of Chechnya or neighboring regions. It would be a mistake to focus solely on these crimes and disregard the equally horrible crimes committed by Russia in suppressing resistance in Chechnya.

The exiled Chagossians have objected to
the proposed Chagos islands marine reserve
as another obstacle to their return. I am in favor of this marine reserve provided adequate and clear provisions are made in advance for the islanders to fish using sustainable methods when they return.

Israeli soldiers
shot two teenagers
plowing a field near Nablus. Last week soldiers shot boys in a village, and the government maintains they didn't fire any shots. Is it plausible that boys would try to stab a soldier who is with a group of soldiers? Of course not. It's a lie, meant to be believed by people who want an excuse to believe.

Peter Watts has been
convicted of a felony.
His crime: asking a customs officer "What is the problem?", after the officer had punched him in the face. I hope Mr. Watts will steadfastly refuse to admit that he did anything wrong. He will be under pressure to do so, but that would grant his oppressors a victory that they cannot get in any other way.

While Mr. Watts says he does not criticize the jury, I think he is mistaken. Being on a jury does not excuse people from moral responsibility for their actions. It does not entitle then to plead "I was only obeying orders (from the judge)" if they rubber-stamp an injustice in progress. The reason
we need juries
is so that can protect people accused based on obviously unjust grounds. The jurors that convicted Peter Watts were derelict in their duty and should be ashamed of themselves.

But what is really needed is to change the law which gives every customs officer the power to imprison people for asking them questions.

I think it would be useful for a campaign to call on Obama to pardon Peter Watts, and to demand a change in this law. It could also warn people to stay away from the US lest they meet the same treatment. I think this campaign would have an excellent chance of contributing in the long term to a change in the law, and some change of gaining Watts a pardon.

The natural place to carry out this campaign would be in science fiction fandom, where there may be fans of Watts' writing, as well as many people who would be incensed at the US government's conduct regardless of who the victim was.

But I cannot organize this campaign as I would wish to, because the free software movement takes up all my capacity. Would anyone else like to organize this campaign? Can anyone suggests contacts in fandom to whom I could suggest it?

The
NGOs in Haiti
amount to a privileged class that the US uses to rule Haiti and keep the poor people down.

I disagree with one point in that article: I would not advocate
giving the aid money to the Haitian state. I doubt it is capable of
running the recovery effort, and I expect it is just as corrupt as the
worst NGOs. But that doesn't invalidate the overall point of the
article. There are NGOs that are not corrupt, and they can be
identified.

In the UK: email your MP again, saying to vote against the Digital Economy Bill if it includes web blocking or disconnection for people who share. And explain what
this article
says about how they are being misled to think the vote won't include anything "controversial". Here's
more information.

Just one Bush forces soldier
will stand trial
for the killing of 24 helpless, unarmed Iraqi civilians who had the bad luck to be present in the neighborhood where a bomb went off. This soldier probably really believes he did nothing wrong, because he had dehumanized the Iraqis and saw their lives as worth very little.

The US wants a weak
global warming treaty
even as other countries are prepared for a stronger one. If Obama was honestly seeking Republican support for this bill, he doesn't learn fast. He should have learned from the health care reform battle that this is self-defeating. If he proceeds now with a "bipartisan" approach, that will mean he is either unable to learn, or perhaps (as some suggest) really on the Republicans' side.

The willingness to talk about the issue is a necessary precondition to doing anything about it. According to The Real War by Jonathan Schell, US officials recognized that the South Vietnamese government was incompetent to do anything, but kept up the public pretence that things were going fine.

However, recognizing the disappointing truth does not imply there is a
way to change it. I don't know if there is any way to bring about a
non-corrupt government in Afghanistan.

A committee of the UK parliament recognized that there is no such thing as a
"special relationship"
between the UK and the US. Disclosures over the past year have made it clear that B'liar was so subservient to Bush that the word "poodle" fits. The UK must recognize this too, in order to change it.

Right-wingers in Israel are
calling Obama a "disaster"
because he objects to constructing colonies in areas Israel calls East Jerusalem. Such exaggeration is a frequent right-wing tactic: to exaggerate how much their opponents disagree with them, in order to make them seem really bad. Consider, for instance, how Republicans call Obama a Liberal.

If mere criticism of a land-grab is a "disaster", I wonder what they will say if the US ever exerts real pressure for Israel to stop the land grab. They will have run out of extreme words.

ACTA is pervasively bad because it is based on the twisted concept of "intellectual property". As
this article shows,
ACTA's first decision is to treat copyright law, patent law, trademark law, and several other laws together as if they were part of a single issue. That's
a fundamental mistake
so naturally it leads to a bad treaty.

The Clown regime demands that its drug science advisors reach scientific conclusions
in accord with the policy the regime has in mind.
It appears mephedrone turns its users temporarily into morons. For me, that is sufficient reason not to use it.

As for the risk of serious harm, whether that is a large risk for teenagers (comparable to driving, for instance) or a small risk is not yet known. Either way, prohibition is likely to do more harm than good. If mephedrone is more dangerous than MDMA, it would be wiser to make MDMA available once again.

A border incident on the frontier of Gaza caused casualties on both sides. The article
mentions that Palestinians have fired some rockets in the last few weeks. It doesn't mention that Israeli troops have killed Palestinians in Gaza on a number of occasions too.

Uri Avnery is optimistic that Obama will require Israel's government to end its settlement construction and start on
the path towards peace.
I am not so optimistic. From this beginning, to reach a point where Israeli policy is conducive to peace means crossing many obstacles, and the Israeli right wing will resist at each one. And even with good will on both sides, making an agreement won't be easy. Still, this is a good beginning.

Iceland has
banned strip clubs,
under the influence of feminism gone awry. If the article's description is accurate, this law also bans commercial production of movies with nudity. I think this law is wrong, and the reasons given in this article are clearly not a justification for it.

If many strippers in Iceland are foreigners, it is legitimate for Iceland to bar foreigners from working in those jobs in order to make more work for Icelanders. Either Icelanders would do the work, or the clubs would close for lack of staff. Perhaps the clubs would have to improve the pay and/or working conditions for strippers in order to attract applicants.

That would be good, but it isn't what Iceland has done. If after this the strippers are not "happy in their work", perhaps it is proper to pass a law to help them. (I am not a supporter of laissez-faire economics.) However, what law would really help them? That depends on why they dislike it, and why they do that job despite disliking it.

Are some stripping because they are drug addicts? That's better than stealing because they are drug addicts. I don't think there is any reliable way to treat drug addiction, but I don't think unemployment is one of the recommend methods. Is it that their other options are worse? For instance, being broke? If so, the way to help them is not to ban stripping and force them into worse options, but rather to improve their other options.

Is it that they don't make enough to live on unless they do lap dances, and they don't like doing them? Requiring the clubs to pay strippers better, and other regulations, could eliminate that pressure. It is wrong to ban prostitution, but there is no reason why strippers should be pressured into also being prostitutes.

I think these supposed reasons are excuses, and the real reason is an irrational prejudice.

As regards whether prostitution is empowering or degrading to the prostitute, that depends on the conditions. Working on the street under the domination of a pimp is surely degrading. Being an independent courtesan is empowering compared with working at MacDonalds, and more honest than selling cars. In an ideal world, perhaps there would be no MacDonalds and no cars, but I don't see a reason to try to eliminate courtesans.

Internet filtering in schools
blocks access to educational materials.
While that article focuses on blockage of the educational materials that prudes would admit, porn is also very important for education. Blocking adolescents' access to porn, or keeping them ignorant of sex in any way, is likely to stunt their emotional growth and make them vulnerable to mistakes that can hurt them badly.

The Anti-Citizen Tyranny Agreement includes an organization to effectively supersede WIPO and the WTO in
ramping up copyright enforcement.
The governments which work for business against their own citizens have a pattern of creating a new international organization for the purpose whenever the existing ones are checked by public opposition. For instance, when the World "Intellectual Property" Organization ceased to be the most convenient tool for ever-increasing copyright and patent powers, the rich countries put requirements about the same laws into the World Trade Organization, using trade pressure on other unrelated issues to bully sell-out governments of other countries into accepting restrictions on their citizens.

But the poor countries allied a few years ago to block further tightening of WTO requirements. So Bush (and now Obama) to seek to create a new and pliable international body in which to do their dirty work.

In 2009, before the election in Aceh, the Indonesian military's commandos assassinated leaders of a party calling for independence of Aceh. Now Obama is considering
resuming military aid
for those commandos.

Greg Palast reports:
Before "progressive" congressman Eric Massa resigned, he got in bed with a vulture capitalist fund that wants to convert the US into its collection agent. It is vicious when the US government attacks poor countries, but it is not a rare event. (See today's note about the US and Aristide.) Indeed, it's a major part of the US Trade Representative's job. The corruption goes deeper than an individual congresscritter here and a senator there; it is fundamental to the system, as long as business has political power.

US citizens:
sign this petition
asking the senate to pass legislation to reduce global warming emissions. I dispute what that page says about the health care law. Having the medical policy decisions dominated by the insurance companies, and by the pharmaceutical companies which got a favorable deal at the beginning, is no change, and the details of the bill change less than one might have hoped.

However, none of that concerns the petition itself, so I decided to sign it and I hope you will too.

Canada has joined the UK and the US in
organizing witch hunts
against photographers, but it warns against artists too. The fuss about photographers in transport stations is mostly foolish, but not 100%. There's a place in some airports
where taking photos is a real concern.

Constance McMillen
won in court;
her school cannot cancel the prom to punish her and her girlfriend. This is not the end of bigotry in our society, so I hope this won't be the end of her career in fighting it.

For the moment, the US should give Haiti as much food as people need.
However, next time Haiti's farmers are in a position to plant rice,
the US should adopt policies to show them they will be able to sell
their crops.

Google's founder Brin presents censorship as
a trade barrier in asking the US to act against censorship.

Ten years ago people like me accused the US government of caring more
about trade barriers than human rights. Now this has gone from an
accusation to a presupposition. Such a government is ipso facto
amoral.

Uri Avnery:
General Petraeus, by pointing out how Israel's rejection of peace with Palestine endangers Americans. The article is mistaken in treating all American Jews as supporters of AIPAC and the Israeli right wing. A large fraction, perhaps a majority, criticize Israel's policy and want Israel to make peace with Palestine.

Karzai is
negotiating with an important militia
of Islamic extremists that is allied with the Taliban. I think this is a positive development. Hekmatyar's extremism is cruel and unjust to women, and his participation in the Afghan government would be a disaster for them; but the existing Afghan government is a disaster for them already, and I do not see that it's sufficiently better than Hekmatyar to justify continuing a war.

Google has
defied the Chinese government
by routing searches in China to uncensored servers in Hong Kong. Even though China censors access to these servers, this is a step forward because (1) Google is no longer complicit and (2) people can see the censorship is imposed by the Chinese government. The complaints from that government indicate that the change has hit the target.

The only part I do not see is how this relates to the Chinese cracking attacks on Google. But never mind that — it is the right thing to do anyway.

Three cheers for
Constance McMillen,
who is insisting on the right to wear a tuxedo with her girlfriend at the high school prom. I admire Ms McMillen because she is campaigning against official endorsement for bigotry. She didn't choose which manifestation to campaign against; rather, it popped up in her life, and gave her the option to resist or cave in.

But let us recognize that this issue is important because bigotry against gays is a major injustice — and avoid the mistake of thinking that the importance comes from the high school prom.

The prom is one of the things that people artificially hype themselves into caring excessively about, the way many care more about their weddings than about what their marriages will be like. The prom is an opportunity to show off your popularity, if you have some, or to fail conspicuously. It is natural that those who expect to do well at this game would enjoy the chance. It is also an opportunity to dress up, if you like doing that. Those conditions could make it an enjoyable occasion, but they are no grounds for the fuss people make.

Instead of feeding this hype, we should gently point out that there are more important things in life. If you expect to enjoy the prom, go and enjoy it. If you encounter bigotry there, resist it there. But don't treat it as an important part of your life.

It seems that Obama has decided not to let the issue drop again, and will continue criticizing the Israeli government for its colonization of Palestinian territory. If so, this could be the beginning (though just the beginning) of what it will take to make Israel make peace.

Under the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland are lots of methane.
If part of the ice sheet melts away, it will release its methane into
the atmosphere,
causing a burst of global warming that could melt more
of the ice sheet.

If the water under the ice sheet begins flowing faster, that too
will increase the methane release.

Human activity is making the Earth's temperature slowly. It looks
like we could arrest this rise later if we don't do it now. But
sooner or later the rise will trigger a positive feedback loop (this
one or another) that will push the Earth to disaster, and we don't
know how far away it is. Should we push our luck?

They deserve to be ashamed. A war against the Taliban for women's
rights would be a just war, if we were really fighting it — but
we are not. As this article shows, Karzai is not a lot better than
the Taliban in regard to women's rights. (Remember the law that
forbade Shi'ite married women from various activities without their
husbands permission?)

Meanwhile, have you noted how the US political right wing
behaves
similarly?
They attack people who report the US's crimes of violence,
saying that they shouldn't make the US look bad.

The plan is good overall, but I think it is unjust and unnecessary to
force people to move. If there are just a few occupied houses in a
block, they can make the rest of the block farmland even while people
remain in those. There are other places in the US which have a
similarly low density of houses, and the inhabitants are happy to have
it that way.

If it is too expensive to provide city services to the few remaining
houses in a neighborhood, Detroit should de-annex the area, making it
into unincorporated land.

That they infiltrated the G20 protest in London does not surprise me.
Recall the statement that someone arrested in at the massive protest in Genoa saw phony "anarchist protestors" armed with sticks getting out of a police vehicle.

Since I recognized it as propaganda, I have rejected it, preferring
terms such as "unauthorized copying" and "forbidden sharing".
However, the Pirate Parties are trying a different tack, turning it
into a badge of defiance like "Yankee". Maybe this is partly
responsible for making the term less appealing as propaganda.

I don't think the propaganda term is dead or ineffective yet, so I
will keep on rejecting it. However, for those who want to try to turn
it around, it's possible to do that while refusing to use it in ways
that help enemy propaganda. Those are when you are talking about
unauthorized copies or the people who make them, in the middle of a
discussion in which you do not give the terms a positive association.

The association between supposedly celibate priests and supposedly
forbidden sexual practices is nothing new. I have a recording of a
Basque folk song in which a woman fends off the advances of a priest.
Perhaps what has changed is that priests no longer have sufficient
impunity to impose on adults.

I wonder what the Maoists propose to do about Kathmandu's smog
problem. The obvious solution is to ban private cars in the city, and
set up lots of buses and a fixed number of taxis, and I'd expect the
Maoists to advocate this; do they? And what do the inhabitants think
of the idea?

The fact that the US labels Nepal's elected Maoist government as
"terrorist" reflects the dishonest nature of that labelling practice.
The US pins the label on whatever groups it dislikes, whether they are
really terrorists or not. When they aren't, the label is a lie.

Such lies are easy for the US because the designation of "terrorist
group" is made by administrative decision, without the need to charge
and convict anyone of a crime. The state uses this power with a
curious selectivity: Islamic charities are
banned after requesting and scrupulously following government advice
about how to operate, but highly dangerous organizations such as large
banks and insurance companies are left untouched.

Regardless of how honestly or wisely the government uses this power,
The power's existence contravenes a basic human right: freedom of
association. This is sufficient by itself to condemn the US
government as tyranny.

Internet users in New Zealand should switch to the ISPs that refuse
to support filtering, even if this means extra expense and trouble.
This is not just a way of escaping government injustice, it is a way
of resisting it.

This concession is not enough to make progress towards peace possible.
That would require a long-term halt to construction of settlements in
the West Bank, not just the current short-period freeze. What is
potentially significant is is that it shows that Obama can stand up to
the Israeli government and make it back down. If he does it a few
more times, he might create a situation where peace is possible.

The government spares no expense to have TSA goons harass travelers
because it can point to that harassment and say, "See how we protect
you." If half of what they do is for show, they can pretend it protects us.

Measures like this, that would protect us without harassing us, appeal
to the government less. If we are not harassed, how would we know how
safe we are?

I take issue with one small point: the use of drones in Afghanistan
against Taliban fighters may be lawful under international law, since
the US troops are there with permission of the Afghan government and
are fighting an armed rebellion. The same might be true in Yemen. I
don't know what to think about Somalia, which has no effective
government
because the US had Ethiopia destroy the one that did exist.

The US
plans to "rebuild" Haiti with sweatshops that will pay even
less than sweatshops in other countries. Haitians have already gone
on strike against sweatshops, and the UN "peacekeepers" crushed the
strike.

Other countries need to recognize that the free exploitation treaties
that the US offers them are intended to keep them poor and struggling,
and say, "Even if other countries let you do this, we will not." Even
better, they should sign treaties binding each other to reject these
offers.

Despite my respect for Kucinich, and my agreement with him on what
really ought to be done (a national health system), I might not agree
with his decision. For me, it depends on whether the bill to be
passed includes a public option. This article does not explicitly
say, but I think the answer is no, and that means the bill is a change
for the worse.

Unlike Mr Floyd, I am not a pacifist. There is a war in Afghanistan;
that the US military try to kill Taliban does not seem outrageous to
me, though given the nature of Karzai, continuing the war seems
futile. However, whether the CIA should join in the fighting is a
different question.

I am in favor of recycling what can be recycled, but I don't see how
composting is either feasible or useful for people living in
apartments in the city. And from the little I know about composting,
not all food waste can be composted.

Even if there is a small danger in using mephedrone, is that a reason
to ban it? Is it more dangerous than alpinism? Perhaps that too
should be banned. Is it more dangerous, for teens, than driving a
car?

I have often felt offended by criticism of my views, but people have a right to criticize and even insult ideas they disagree with, so I learned to live with it and Muslims must learn it too. Nothing that people do or say is entitled to immunity from criticism — not even the Church of Emacs.

Utah has
made it a crime
for a woman to intentionally cause a miscarriage. Since there would rarely be clear evidence of intention, this means persecution of any woman who has a miscarriage in Utah and that the public does not like.

Colonel Nicholas Mercer
tried
to prevent the torture of prisoners in Iraq, starting shortly after the Bush forces' invasion, but his commanders silenced him and threatened to punish him.
Another article
has some additional information.

A Chinese local government, which arrested people on the way to get medical tests,
tried to excuse the injustice
by saying it thought they were planning a protest. Although China continues to call itself "Communist", this sort of collusion between government and business, combined with disrespect for human rights, is more accurately known as Fascism. Fascism occurs in many countries, including the US, but the authorities are usually ashamed if people find out. In China their are often totally brazen about it.

The FBI is using Facebook to
find criminals.
I don't see anything wrong with this, as far as the article describes it, as long as the crimes are real wrongs. Only a stupid criminal would publish information on Facebook, but real criminals (as distinguished from those in detective fiction) are often stupid.

It starts becoming worrysome when this is applied also to absurd "crimes", such as running web sites about the animal rights movement, that really represent the denial of human rights. And when it is applied to investigating dissident groups so as to sabotage their actions. We can hardly count on the FBI's respect for democracy to hold it back from such things.

The UK has proposed large
wave and tide power
generators. The one step between the construction of sea and wind power facilities and a reduction in carbon emissions is to reduce the generation of electricity by burning coal and oil. This is why the plans to build new coal-powered plants are worrysome.

Now that people around the world have started to pay attention to what human rights groups in Israel say about the violation of Palestinians' human rights, the Israeli government is
attacking these groups at every level:
from calling them terrorists, to cutting off foreign funding, to making all members register with the government, to blocking their supporters from visiting Palestine.

Protestors have
taken over Bangkok
on behalf of deposed Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was convicted of corruption. Although Thaksin is the
clear choice of Thai democracy,
there are grave charges against him. I have no way of judging the corruption charges against Thaksin; it would not surprise me if they were valid, and it would not surprise me if they were a frame-up. I also don't know whether
Thaksin authorized the death squads.
If he is guilty, it means a dilemma for Thais who support both democracy and justice. Somehow they have to strengthen other parties that support both the common people's economic well-being and human rights.

The US is preparing to
remove most of the Bush forces
from Iraq. However, some 50,000 "non-combat" troops will remain, and some of them are really combat troops labeled as
non-combat troops.
But even aside from troops, the Iraqi government will remain more or less under US control, and its oil industry will be controlled by multinational oil companies.

Everyone in the US: Rachel Corrie's parent say: call the White House at 202-456-1111 to say that envoy George Mitchell should visit Gaza, and the US should immediately provide humanitarian aid and building materials to Gaza. Then go
here
to report your call.

What makes these construction plans bad is that they are part of a
continuing plan to cement the annexation of part of the West Bank.
The insult of announcing the plans just after Biden's visit is a minor
detail, in ethical terms. But if the insult creates an opportunity
for increased US pressure to stop settlement construction, it could
have good effects.

After Hurricane Katrina, when the authorities were more interested in
arresting people than saving them, Abdulrahman Zeitoun
saved 10 stranded people with his boat.
For this he was arrested and accused of being a terrorist.

It also reports that torture tends to corrupt the victim's memories.
Thus, even if the victim is a real terrorist, not one mistakenly
accused, and even if he has crucial information, and even supposing
torture makes him give that information rather than a false
confession, what he says still can't be trusted.

Torture works great for extracting confessions, as long as you don't
care whether they are true or false.

The city of Mountain View "protected" elderly Loretta Pangrac from the danger of her unrepairable leaky roof by
demolishing her house and billing her for it.
Perhaps it is true that Ms Pangrac might have been killed by collapse of part of her house, and then the city could have been sued. But she is not out of danger now. If she cannot afford another place to live, she could die from sleeping under no roof at all. But the city would not be liable if she dies that way. Thus, the city has not protected her, only itself.

A house which is dangerous to live in is a real problem — unlike disconnecting your refrigerator — and something has to be done about it. If it could not be repaired, it would have to be demolished, some day. But why the rush? Surely some temporary makeshift could have made it safe enough for Ms Pangrac to continue living there for her remaining years. Then they could demolish it.

Big beverage companies are using
distraction campaigns
to sabotage efforts to impose a tax to discourage consumption of sugar-filled beverages in schools. I doubt that selling smaller portion of soda would directly reduce the amount students drink. They might just as likely buy more portions. A larger number of smaller portions might cost more; this price increase could reduce consumption just as a tax would. But the money would go to the companies instead of to the public treasury. Maybe schools should stop selling sugary drinks.

The US calls for
protecting polar bears from hunting,
since global warming and melting Arctic ice is likely to cause their numbers to crash. The goal is valid, but these measures can hardly suffice to protect polar bears if we destroy their habitat. What we need to do is cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The EU will support
a ban on international sales of bluefin tuna,
so the species can recover. I am all in favor of better management of the fish stocks, but experience shows that we must not presume the management will improve. We also must not presume that an attempt at better management will succeed in increasing fish stocks. A ban on international sales may not even be enough; consider the cod of the Grand Banks, which have not recovered despite more than a decade of incomplete protection. It would be safer to ban all catching of bluefin tuna in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, then apply better management. If stocks increase, fishing could resume.

Un-american extremists such as Liz Cheney are
attacking the US government
for providing lawyers to people accused of terrorism. I guess Cheney and friends would prefer a system which simply declares people guilty, as Stalin used to do.

European companies are
saving up large amounts of carbon emission credits,
bought from countries where nobody needed them, so that they can avoid any real emissions reduction under possible future treaties. This is a well-known flaw in the "cap and trade" approach to CO2 emissions: it is too easy to game that system. (Likewise, most
"carbon-neutral" business schemes
are bogus.) It is much better to put a tax on all emissions. If this is done in an intelligent way (for instance, tax the sale of fuel rather than the burning of the fuel), it would be easy to collect and hard to evade.

A bankrupcy examiner says that Lehman Brothers executives
misrepresented the firm's balance
as it was bought out, and the accountanting firm, Ernst & Young, supported the deception despite warning from a whistleblower. The health of the financial system depends on punishing those responsible severely, especially the accounting firm. Everyone involved there should not be allowed to practice accounting any more.

In Kansas City, everyone who isn't poor has abandoned the public schools, and now
half of them have to be closed
to save expense. Consolidating the schools is not a bad thing; why waste money keeping open more schools than are needed? But there remains the deeper issue remains how to fund public schools. Many have argued that funding schools from local taxes leads to bad education in areas where people are poor.

A girl wanted to go to the prom with her girlfriend,
so the school canceled the prom.
The school is trying to manipulate the other students into blaming this girl for the school's decision. "The authorities" commonly use this trick. The response is to explain the trick so students learn not to fall for it.

The Palestinian Authority is adopting a law
forbidding Palestinians from working
in the Israeli colonies in the West Bank. This boycott, entirely nonviolent, is an obvious step, but it will require real sacrifice.

Burma's dictators say they have
annulled Aung San Suu Kyi's election
as president. Their "law" cannot change the truth, which is that her prior election as president annuls any authority they claim to have.

Theory: congressional Democrats planned all along to pass a bad health care bill.
The theory as stated
has a flaw: it assumes that Democratic legislators planned to be voted out of office. I expect most of them can be bought, more or less, but I doubt they would sell their careers. Nonetheless, it is useful to look in these directions for a theory.

Christine Stevens may
lose her home because she disconnected her electricity
and lived without a refrigerator. We need laws about the quality of housing offered for sale or rent, to protect the public from mistreatment. But if you live in your own house, as long as it isn't dangerous to others, they have no business telling you it isn't good enough.

A Sea Shepherd protestor who
boarded a Japanese whaling ship,
to conduct a symbolic arrest of its captain, faces charges carrying 3 years in prison. Meanwhile Japanese anti-whaling activists who found whale meat that had been stolen by whaling ship crew, and showed it to the authorities as evidence of that theft,
still face trial
for "stealing" the meat.

Massachusetts citizens: call Speaker of the House Robert DeLeo, and State Rep. Sanchez, co chair of the Joint Committee on Public Health, and Senate President Teresa Murray, to support HB 2160, the medical marijuana bill. For more info, see
mpp.org.

The UK
protested privately
to the US about Bush's torture policies, when it found out about them. It made sense to try a private protest as the first step. However, when that protest achieved nothing, the UK went on with its "special relationship" with the torturer. That cannot be excused.

China has
arrested lots of Tibetans
to make sure there cannot be a protest. China is not the only government which preemptively sabotages protest.
Iran
has done this often in the past year and
the UK
has done it too. The European Union has
closed borders
to stop Europeans from coming to protests.

Americans who organized to provide support to people who want to
commit suicide
have been arrested. It appears all they gave was advice and
logistical arrangements.

It appears that these people are still ambulatory and don't need
physical assistance to kill themselves. But they want help with
preparations, and moral support.

There are many kinds of suffering which make us say "I'd rather die"
when we think about them. Not all of them are fatal in the short
term. When these things happen, many of the victims decide they'd
rather live after all. But some don't, and they should not be
perversely forced to go on suffering — especially if that is
forever.

Renewable energy generation, and increases in the efficiency of using
energy, are cheaper as well as safer. As Amory Lovins showed,
spending money on building new nuclear plants will mean less
reduction in carbon emissions than spending the same money on
renewables and efficiency.

39 people who entered the CIA's secret prisons were never heard of
again. We they tortured to death? Shot? Are they still prisoners?
If the US does not say, that means it has disappeared them.
This puts the US in the same class with the murderous generals of
Argentina.

General Varela is now in prison. Bush and Cheney ought to be in
prison, along with everyone else who participated in the US torture
system.

39 people who entered the CIA's secret prisons were never heard of
again. Were they tortured to death? Shot? Are they still prisoners?
If the US does not say, that means it has disappeared them.
This puts the US in the same class with the murderous generals of
Argentina.

General Varela is now in prison. Bush and Cheney ought to be in
prison, along with everyone else who participated in the US torture
system.

This is a consequence of human overpopulation. Where humans are
destroying the forest for fuel, they are heading for disaster; cutting
down the forest, while it extinguishes gorillas and many other species of
wildlife, can at best postpone the disastr a few years, and will make
it bigger when it happens. Sooner or later people will have to live
with the energy resources they have. The sooner they have to start,
the less harm they will do.

The deficit-reducing measures described in this article are all
regressive: the burden falls hardest on the poor. Shouldn't the rich
bear the same share of the burden, or more? The loss of a given
fraction of of income hurts the poor more than it hurts the rich, so
the same share of the burden means that the rich would lose a larger
fraction of their income.

If the public rejection is strong enough, maybe Papandreou will decide
to shift tax to the rich. Or maybe some other party prepared to do so
will present itself.

The UK is in the process of
blocking vulture funds
from their courts; will the US do the same? Liberia should make it a crime to try to collect for a Vulture fund; then its agents could seize the perpetrators anywhere in the world as the US does with suspected terrorists. But, unlike the US, it should give them fair trials.

Several Icelandic banks collapsed in 2008; foreign governments are making threats to pressure Iceland's people to assume the cost, but they seem to
refuse to give in.
IMF loans come with conditions that put the burden mainly on the poor. To accept one is the problem, not the solution.

On Tuesday, March 9, insurance company CEOs are meeting in Washington DC to plot how to make health care reform even worse. There will be a protest. The march starts at Dupont Circle at: 11:00 A.M. and goes to the Ritz Carlton. I think you can find more info somewhere
here.

Right-wing extremism has become
much stronger in the US
with help from "tea party" tax protestors. These extremists are right that the US government has attacked our freedom. Bush launched the attack, with the U SAP AT RIOT act, torture, military tribunals, systematic spying, Guantanamo and Bagram prison, but the right-wing extremists don't blame Bush. Instead they blame Obama, who merely supports and continues the evils Bush began.

I suspect that right-wing organizations with lots of money are playing both sides of the game. They supported Bush, and now they mislead the extremists about who to blame.

Contrasting America's pretense of morality with
China's out-and-out greed.
Is it better to be an unabashedly greedy bully, or to be a greedy bully that pretends to give moral lessons? I think it's a toss-up between lousy and lousy.

In Chile,
soldiers protected food in supermarkets from "looters" who were hungry, and shot water cannon at people who needed water to drink. Older roads in Chile survived the earthquake, but newer ones made by private contractors were built badly to save money, so they collapsed.

The article ironically supports a similar FUD campaign by using the
propaganda term "piracy" to refer to forbidden sharing. Perhaps
the author did not recognize that as propaganda. Also, it was
not nice to us hackers to use the term "hacker" to refer to
someone who breaks security.

US citizens: phone your senators to support repeal of the "don't ask,
don't tell" policy towards gays in the military.

(I have declined to support some actions for this particular cause
because they invited people to praise the US military for "serving
their country". They could potentially do so if the US were attacked,
but in reality they more often invade other countries. Recent
examples include Haiti and Iraq.)

World pressure has made Israel suspend a plan to
demolish 22 Palestinian homes
in Jerusalem. Here's more information on (I think)
the same demolition plan.
This does not mean demolition of Palestinian homes in Jerusalem has been stopped. This suspension applies to just one project.

The US pointedly
declined to support the UK
against Argentina's demands to for control over the Falkland Islands, This is, apparently, the UK's reward for its slavish "special relationship" in which B'liar had to launch a war of aggression when the US told him to. Apparently the relationship was special only from one side.

Clinton says she wants the UK and Argentina to "talk", but that is wrong advice. The inhabitants of the Falkland islands don't want to be ruled by Argentina, and Argentina has no right to impose its power on them. There is nothing to talk about.

The Israeli Army is
tracking Israeli participants
in Palestinian nonviolent protests and stopping them from reaching the protest area. Interference with freedom of assembly is common among states that are democratic in form but not in substance.

Excess CO2 in the ocean is
dissolving coral reefs.
By 2100 they are likely to all be gone. This by itself would be a mass extinction. It would also be disastrous for many fish populations, if we have not already destroyed them, and would cause a food crisis for humans.

At the investigation into the leaked Climatic Research Unit emails, Philip Jones says the accusations against him are false and that
the facts will show this.
It definitely should be standard scientific practice to show the software source code used to analyze the data. Not just in climate research, but always.

Many Iraqis openly
sell their votes,
because they are desperately poor and don't believe it matters who wins the election. President al Maliki is accused of
buying votes with guns.
It is not unusual for political parties in Iraq to hand out guns. In the recent past, most political parties had militias; as far as I know, they still do.

The UK plans to
outlaw open wifi networks
in order to conscript everyone into the copyright police. People should keep their wifi networks without passwords specifically to refuse to serve in the army of the copyright empire.

Each note starts with a date and a brief topic in parentheses. That
text is also a link to that note.
For instance, if the note
starts with "20 July 2003 (Iraq)" then you can link to it with
"https://stallman.org/notes/may-aug-03.html#20 July 2003 (Iraq)".